


The Raven Girls

by lesbiankavinsky



Series: Lady TRC [1]
Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, F/F, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-11
Updated: 2016-05-13
Packaged: 2018-05-13 04:42:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 27
Words: 55,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5695192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lesbiankavinsky/pseuds/lesbiankavinsky
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>TRC, but with ladies. This will follow canon with some slight variations.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

“You missed world hist,” Ronan says, by way of a hello. “I thought you were dead in a ditch.” She says it to deflect any suspicion on Gansey’s part that this might actually be true. In fact, nothing short of real worry about Gansey’s well-being would have compelled Ronan to answer her phone, but she figures that if she says it with enough irony, Gansey will assume that she wasn’t worried in the slightest. The fact that anger at Gansey for letting her worry is beginning to gnaw through her bones adds all the authenticity she needs to the tone of her voice. 

“Did you get notes for me,” Gansey asks, and her soothing, posh Virginia accent is doing as much to infuriate Ronan as to calm her. Now that she knows Gansey and the Camaro aren’t together in heaven, Ronan is mostly thinking about the fact that Gansey, who gets anxious when Ronan so much as goes up to the roof of Monmouth Manufacturing when she can’t sleep, has the audacity to flippantly ask for world hist notes after having been radio silent all night and all morning. 

“No,” Ronan says, and this time there’s nothing forced about the acid in her voice. “I thought you were dead in a ditch.”

“Come get me.”

Ronan lies back down. She’s been in her room all morning. When Gansey is here she drags her along to Aglionby but without her, any point that school might have had disappeared and she had spent her day chewing on various things and trying to decide whether to be mad at or worried about her friend. She keeps the phone pressed to her ear and waits, trying to calculate if a long enough silence will unnerve Gansey. She wants to unnerve her, even though she’s too far away to enjoy the sight. But the truth is that Gansey is far too used to Ronan’s sullen silences to be bothered, and Ronan knows this. Rolling over on to her stomach, she asks, “Where are you?”

“By the Henrietta sign. Bring me some food, would you?”

“Gansey --”

“And have Eve come along.”

Ronan hits end call and flips back onto her back to stare at the ceiling. She knows what Gansey will want to eat (a hamburger, no sauce, no pickles) and she knows that Eve will agree to come because it’ll be time for lunch and she won’t have to miss class. Still, the idea of making it out of her room and collecting the burger and Eve before she drives out to pick Gansey up seems a monumental task. She’ll be alright once she and the BMW are on the highway, but there’s an impossible piece of time between now and then. Come on, Ronan.

Finally, she gets up and goes into the cramped room that serves as bathroom, kitchen and laundry room at Monmouth Manufacturing and splashes some water on her face before she texts Eve to be in the parking lot at Aglionby in five minutes and makes her way downstairs. 

*

Gansey does not look like she’s been awake all night, nor like she’s just spent an hour waiting by the side of the road for help. No, Ronan thinks as she pulls the BMW over to the side of the road behind the Camaro, Gansey looks like her usual splendid self. Her perfectly blonde hair, pinned back with two barrettes, makes her look like a 50s movie star and she wears the Aglionby uniform with an ease Ronan could never muster. Then again, it would be a stretch to say that Ronan wears the uniform at all. Given the choice between the pleated skirt that Gansey prefers and the slacks that Eve wears, Ronan had picked black jeans and cheerfully goes home if a teacher ever had the nerve to point them out. She wears the white button down shirt because she looks good in it and she knows it, and she wears the tie because its masculinity pleases her. The blazer she does not wear. Ronan is not displeased with her clothes, but still, seeing Gansey standing there against the Camaro in her neat uniform and her low heels that Ronan would brain someone with before wearing, she feels a strange pang of envy. 

She gets out, slamming the door behind her and carries Gansey her lunch. 

“What’s Eve doing?” Gansey asks as she pulls the burger out to inspect it -- as though Ronan would ever get her order wrong. Again, there’s that pang of envy, but this time it’s expected and Ronan knows its source, even if she ignores it.

“She’s talking to Declan. I told her not to but she picked up the fucking phone.”

Eve’s head poked out of the passenger window, her hand covering the end of Ronan’s phone to try to prevent Declan from hearing her. “He had called three times, Ronan, he wasn’t going to leave you alone.”

“You’re pissed at her?” Gansey asks through a mouthful of hamburger. 

The question is pointless so Ronan just glares before moving over to the popped hood of the car to look at the engine. Not that she’ll be able to make anything of it, but she doesn’t want to look at Gansey right now. Eve will be able to take care of it once she’s off the phone with Declan. Soon enough she hears the car door open and close softly and Eve comes to join her by the hood. She’s taken off her Aglionby button down and is in only a camisole which shows both the lovely patterns of freckles across her shoulders and the fading remains of a bruise on her chest, just below her collarbone. Struck by the desire to kiss both, Ronan turns away and digs her nails into the palm of her hand. Everything is pissing her off today. 

“So,” Gansey’s voice comes from the other side of Eve. “Will you be able to fix it, do you think?”

“Yeah, of course,” Eve says. “Ronan, be a dear and get me the toolbox from your backseat?”

Ronan complies and by the time she gets back, Gansey has retrieved a handheld cassette player from the front seat of the Camaro and is fidgeting with it. Ronan hands the toolbox to Eve and stuffs her hands in her pockets.

“So, Declan wants us to get dinner?” She asks.

“Yeah,” Eve says as she begins to fiddle with the engine. “He arranged it so you’ll be in class, but Gansey and Leah will go to Nino’s with him tonight.”

“And you,” Gansey says.

“If I’m invited,” Eve says, determinedly looking at neither of them. 

“Of course you’re invited,” Gansey says, taking a moment to glare at Ronan, as though Ronan were the reason for Eve’s timidity. 

“I just like to make sure,” Eve says, but she’s relaxed noticeably. 

“Well, I guess we’ll have to humor him,” Gansey says. “Anyway, I wanted you two to hear what I recorded last night.” 

The anxiety with which Gansey has been waiting to say this is obvious to Ronan, but she stops herself from commenting on it.

Eve pauses from her work to listen when Gansey hits play on the cassette player. After several seconds of insect noises, Gansey’s voice says “Gansey.” It’s not her usual bright tone, nor the buttery voice she uses when she’s trying to get something out of someone, nor the disappointed parent voice that she sometimes uses on Ronan, but something more stripped down even than the nights when she and Ronan talk together through their shared insomnia. For reasons she can’t quite name, this is frightening to Ronan.

Then another voice comes through, soft and dusky, much more distant than Gansey’s. “Is that all?” Then, after a long pause, Gansey again. “That’s all there is.”

Gansey hits the stop button. “So,” she says. “Are you going to ask what I was doing when I was recording that?” Neither of them asks, but Gansey knows them both well enough not to need a reply. “Nothing. I wasn’t doing anything. I was sitting alone in my car, and I didn’t talk to anyone. I didn’t hear anything either, until I played the recording back this morning on my way into town.

“Then you’re saying that wasn’t you talking but -- what? Your spirit?” Eve asks.

“That would make the most sense, certainly. People say the voices of spirits travel long distances over the leyline. Only trouble is, I’m not a spirit.”

“Maybe,” Eve muses as she returns to tinkering with the engine, “your voice was travelling over time as well as space.”

“Maybe,” Gansey agrees. She turns to Ronan. “What do you think?” 

“Everything is fucking illuminated,” Ronan says, without real malice. The recording isn’t a clue, it’s just another mystery, one more thing they can’t explain. But Ronan gave up trying to fight Gansey’s endless enthusiasm a long time ago. 

Eve shuts the hood and wipes her brow. “See if it starts,” she tells Gansey, and steps back. Gansey opens the driver’s door and sits with her feet still hanging out of the car to turn the keys. After a few tries, the engine starts and Gansey hurrahs and pulls her feet in and and closes the door behind her. 

“Meet you back at school?” Eve asks through the window. 

“Sounds good,” Gansey replies. 

Now that Gansey is at the wheel of the living Camaro with its obnoxiously loud engine and its strong smell of gasoline, Ronan thinks she suddenly looks much less polished and much more human. She’s always had an instinct that this is why the car means so much to Gansey, though she’s never said so. 

“I’ll have to work on it some more after school, something’s still not right.”

Gansey nods. “Well, isn’t that the way it always is.”

Gansey pulls off the shoulder and heads down the highway away from them as Eve and Ronan get back into the BMW to follow. They sit in silence for a while before Ronan speaks.

“Don’t you ever get sick of fixing her shit for her?”

Eve seems relieved that Ronan’s earlier irritation over the phone call has dissipated. She shrugs. “No, not really. I like cars and the Camaro is fun to work on. Besides, it’s what I’m good at. It’s what I can do. If I do stuff like this, it means I don’t owe her.”  
Ronan shakes her head, irritated for reasons she doesn’t see any point in verbalizing because Eve will never understand anyway. “It’s not like you owed her before.” 

“It just makes things feel a little less unequal.”

The fact that Eve doesn’t think things are equal grates at Ronan. She wishes she could tell her that it’s stupid and Eve is probably smarter than either of them and better at any number of things, and that, not least of all, she is a ferociously strong human being. That it’s a ridiculous thing to be insecure about. That it’s just money. But she’s not dumb enough to say something like “it’s just money” to Eve Parrish. She knows exactly what the response would be. That’s easy for you to say, you’ve got all of it. It’s not a fight Ronan feels like having. She would rather be making fun of of Whelk or arguing with Gansey about the leylines or throwing Declan over the hood of a car. Or punching Robert Parrish in the face. But that’s not something she can safely think about while driving a car. Still, Robert Parris is the heart of the matter as Ronan sees it. With a different father, Eve would be an entirely different creature. But it’s not worth thinking about, and she knows it. It’s like imagining who she, Ronan, would be if her mother was still alive, but worse. Eve’s trauma is older and more continuous and the idea of comparing the two make Ronan’s insides crawl with shame, though she knows Gansey would tell her to be kinder to herself. Not that they would ever talk about something like this. Not that Ronan would ever say any of this.

“You’re no better or worse that the rest of us, don’t be such a fucking priss.”

They don’t talk for rest of the drive and Ronan turns on the radio. As they pull into the Aglionby parking lot, Ronan begins to think about the recording. As unimpressed as she had been with it, she now can’t stop thinking about the way Gansey’s voice had sounded. How tired, how soft, how bare. If Eve is right, and Gansey’s voice had travelled across time as well as space, then Gansey is going to sound like that sometime in the future. Ronan can only hope that that future isn’t anytime soon.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Declan sets up periodic lunches with the girls of Monmouth Manufacturing for reasons not entirely clear to Ronan. She thinks he must do it in some strange way to honor their dead mother and silent father. Still, he always manages to do it when Ronan will be away, so Declan ends up taking Gansey, Leah, and Eve out to dinner without Ronan. Not that Ronan minds this; the last time that the Lynch family ate a peaceful meal together was when their mother, Nora, was alive. Nora Lynch had been a fighter but she had been able to hold the peace even between Ronan and Declan. In her absence the tension between them has been stretched taut and dangerous."

The problem is this: Declan wants Ronan to stop sullying the Lynch name. At least that’s the way Ronan puts it. Declan allows Ronan to live with Gansey because he thinks (and rightly so) that Ronan is more likely to get acceptable grades, stay in school and not die at the wheel of her BMW in a street race if she is in Gansey’s soothing and protective presence. All of this irritates Ronan because while Declan has turned himself into a politician in a crisp suit, he’s still a Lynch underneath it all. Ronan thinks she’s doing more to live up to the Lynch name than to sully it. Declan is a pack of lies. His behavior in public may be nearly perfect, but Ronan knows with certainty that he’s still itching for a fight, a race, a drink. Anything to soften the edges of the sharp and noisy Lynch heart.

Declan sets up periodic lunches with the girls of Monmouth Manufacturing for reasons not entirely clear to Ronan. She thinks he must do it in some strange way to honor their dead mother and silent father. Still, he always manages to do it when Ronan will be away, so Declan ends up taking Gansey, Leah, and Eve out to dinner without Ronan. Not that Ronan minds this; the last time that the Lynch family ate a peaceful meal together was when their mother, Nora, was alive. Nora Lynch had been a fighter but she had been able to hold the peace even between Ronan and Declan. In her absence the tension between them has been stretched taut and dangerous. The other girls play nice with Declan for Ronan’s sake, and Ronan steers clear of him whenever possible. 

Ronan almost feels bad for not appreciating Aglionby, but the truth is that it will never mean as much to her as it does to Gansey or Eve. It’s validating for both of them, though in different ways. For Gansey, it’s a question of gender. She had transferred to Aglionby, an all female school, almost a year after beginning her transition and she sees it as a sort of final acceptance of her girlhood. For Eve, it means that she has proven her worth, her ability to excel under the right circumstances, her out-of-placeness in her own home. She does not belong to the doublewide, nor her father, nor this dusty town. She belongs elsewhere. But Ronan doesn’t have their dreams or their desires and school makes her furiously restless and even if it didn’t she would be pulled in too many directions by distraction to be any good at it. And it’s not as though she’s going to have to get a job when she leaves school -- her trust fund will keep her comfortably upper class without any effort on her part. Ronan knows that the only reason Declan cares how she does in school is because her failures reflect poorly on him, and maybe it’s that thought that makes her skip tennis practice that night to antagonize him. 

Locked in her room, she sits on the floor by the door to listen in when he arrives with Eve and his new girlfriend (always a new girlfriend, Ronan thinks with a bitterness that she dislikes but is unable to suppress), listens to Gansey explain her quest to the girlfriend, Ashley, and hears Leah emerge and tell Ashley that she’s been dead seven years. Ronan grins when she hears that. It’s a line Leah uses on a regular basis and a hallmark of Leah’s odd sense of humor, which Ronan likes even though it isn’t exactly funny. Maybe it’s a desire to see Leah, who has been cooped up in her room even longer than usual, that compels Ronan to stand and open her door. 

Declan is standing in his usual neat intern’s suit next to his generically blonde girlfriend and the fact that the sight makes Ronan jealous only serves to piss her off more. This is one of the countless things that she’s never going to understand about Declan -- how Declan goes through girlfriends, how he treats them like an infinitely renewable commodity. Ronan has known she’s gay since she was nine years old and she’s been out since she was fourteen and she’s had more crushes than she can count but she’s never had a girlfriend. The intensity with which she wants one makes it impossible for to imagine treating one with such nonchalance. It’s more than that, though. It’s that Ronan’s entire ethical framework, which is robust in spite of her general spitefulness, is based around two principles: loyalty and honesty. Declan’s lack of dedication in matters of love is incomprehensible to her. It would be one thing if he simply slept around -- though it isn’t what Ronan herself would want, she can accept that some people just want to have sex. But Declan actually has relationships. He dates, but only until he gets bored, and his attention span is unbelievably brief. 

The expression of Declan’s entire body shifts as he sees his younger sister and Ronan is struck again by the peculiarity of him setting up dinners with her friends but never with her, the tenacity with which he holds to the pretense of a connection without contact. 

“Ronan. I thought you had tennis.”

“I did,” Ronan says, and stands against the doorframe in silence. Unlike Gansey, Declan has never managed to become immune to Ronan’s silences, and she can see him becoming progressively more uncomfortable as the silence continues. Ronan can see Declain running through different possible responses, but she doesn’t give him time to pick one. 

“Nice boyfriend,” she comments to Ashley. “Typically lasts a night or two, but maybe he’s started doing three or four, I’m not sure, it’s been a while since we had a chat.” 

She feels a mix of pleasure and regret as Ashely’s face twists into a dismayed sort of grimace. Ronan has always liked provoking a reaction, but the fact that this one is coming primarily from Ashley when her target had been Declan disappoints her and almost makes her feel a little guilty. 

“Ronan --” Gansey begins and Ronan can see from her expression that she’s going to try to get her to apologize, so she’s grateful that Declan cuts her off.

“Ashley, let’s go.” He drags her by the hand to the door, where he momentarily turns to point at Gansey. “You don’t get to fix this for her,” he says, before heading down the stairs with Ashley. Ronan catches the beginning of him explaining her away to Ashley through the still open door. “She’s been screwed up ever since she found mom, I’ve tried to get her to a therapist --” 

Gansey closes the door behind them, and Ronan is grateful. She doesn’t want to hear it. Gansey turns back to the three of them and puts on her rallying-the-troops smile. “Let’s go to Nino’s. We can call that psychic Eve found and figure out our next steps, what to do with this recording.” She looks at Ronan. “It doesn’t have to be a bad night.”

“I don’t think I’ll go,” Leah says, shrinking back towards her room. 

Ronan rolls her eyes. “Need more alone time?”

“Ronan, don’t. Come on, Leah. We miss you.”

Leah folds her arms close to her chest but finally nods and Gansey’s smile is back. 

The four of them go down the stairs and pile into the Camaro and Gansey turns on the radio as they drive to Nino’s. She sings along, a little out of key, drumming her fingers against the steering wheel along to the beat and Ronan smiles at her from the passenger seat a little more unguardedly than she would have if she had thought there was any chance of Gansey looking over at her. 

Ronan has always picked her friends with care. Her general hostility toward the world means that she has high standards for letting anyone into her life, and once she has established someone as a friend, the relationship is permanent. Everyone in this car is permanent. But Gansey is special, and while she is coming to see her more as a sister than anything else, she thinks she’s always going to be a little in love with Gansey. It’s possible that everyone who has ever met Gansey is a little in love with Gansey. Ronan looks back out at the road and rests her head on her hand as they hurtle down the street toward Nino’s. Gansey’s good mood has lifted Ronan’s. Her happiness is infectious -- her out of tune singing, the tossing of her hair, the fact that she is driving a ways above the docile Henrietta speed limit all points to Gansey’s renewed excitement over the quest. She was right earlier when she said that it doesn’t have to be a bad night. They’re rid of Declan, they have a new mystery to puzzle over, and the possibility of magic existing in Henrietta seems more real than ever. 

Gansey pulls into the Nino’s parking lot and they step out of the car. It’s been weeks since Ronan has felt such comfort in their togetherness, has felt them so completely a unit. Gansey pulls the door open and they follow her in. The place is full of Aglionby girls, but they get their usual booth near the back and shuffle comfortably into their usual formation. They order and, while they wait for their pizza, speculate wildly about Gansey’s voice on the cassette tape. This conversation doesn’t have anything to do with trying to actually figure out what had happened, it’s just them imagining spectacular solutions to the mystery. When the pizza arrives, Leah won’t eat any and this gets Ronan worrying, and the bright mood of the drive over is punctured and dissolves. She starts chewing at her leather bracelets and thinking about Declan again. When she progresses from chewing on the bracelets to drumming her hands against the table, Gansey tells her to take a walk, and, only a few seconds later, sends Leah after her. As if she isn’t going to notice that. Points off for lack of subtlety, she thinks, and regrets it. 

In the parking lot, she kicks at the curb and wishes Leah was the kind of person who would agree to fight her. She wishes she could go for a run or just beat the shit out of a punching bag or even a pillow. Though she’d started off thinking about Declan, she doesn’t know what she’s mad about anymore. Leah sits calm and cross legged by the door, which would piss Ronan off even more if it were anyone else, but she never gets mad at Leah. Ronan quits kicking the curb and goes to sit down next to her.

“Bad night, huh?” Leah says.

Ronan nods. It’s something about Leah’s simplicity, Ronan thinks, her transparency. That’s why she never gets mad at her. She never says anything she doesn’t mean. Picking at the asphalt beneath her feet, Ronan tries to find words. “I feel like I’m getting pressed in from all sides. Like if I stopped fighting for half a second my entire existence would just get squeezed out.”

“Okay,” Leah says.

A car comes careening into the parking lot. Ronan looks up and her stomach clenches because this isn’t possible, there’s no good reason for this to happen, for him to do this. She had been so certain when he’d left the apartment that he wouldn’t want to see her again any time soon, that she’d annoyed him sufficiently to send him away for long enough to let her get her peace of mind back, but there’s no mistaking Declan’s car. It parks in front of them and Ashley gets out, skittering past them into the building. Ronan stands and stuffs her hands into her pockets, glaring at Declan through the windshield. He rolls his window down and leans out. 

“Ronan.”

“Declan.”

“I thought we could have a little chat while Ashley’s in the bathroom.”

There’s no way this is going to end well, and they both know it. Ronan turns to Leah, but she’s gone -- she must have followed Ashley in and gone to warn Gansey. Well then, Ronan thinks, adjusting her stance and balling her hand into a fist. She doesn’t have much time to beat the shit out of her brother before Gansey comes and makes her play nice.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "In the parking lot behind Nino’s she hits him because he ruined the happiness of a perfectly good night, because he won’t leave her the fuck alone, because he treats his girlfriends like shit. Her knuckles against his jaw, his shoulder, a punch to the gut."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Since I'm writing this fairly quickly and I'm incredibly impatient, I'm increasing the publication schedule from twice a week to three times a week so new chapters will be posted Monday/Wednesday/Friday. If I get overwhelmed I'll go back to the Monday/Thursday schedule. Thanks so much for reading!

Ronan has never had much trouble beating Declan in a fight if she puts her mind to it. It’s easier for him to build muscle than it is for her, but he’s lazy about it and has never maintained a strict workout regimen. Besides that, he’s never been a good boxer. Their mother taught both of them, but Declan didn’t work at it. He’s sloppy, his footwork is slow and inexact, and the main thing he has going for him is that he always hits like he means it. But so does Ronan. 

In the parking lot behind Nino’s she hits him because he ruined the happiness of a perfectly good night, because he won’t leave her the fuck alone, because he treats his girlfriends like shit. Her knuckles against his jaw, his shoulder, a punch to the gut. She hits harder when she’s this pissed off, but she’s also not as careful. With more focus she could dodge his blows, but she doesn’t care if he hits her, so he does. Ashley had returned while they were still in the verbal phase of this fight, and now she sits nervously in the passenger seat. A smirk flickers on Ronan’s face for a moment when she sees Ashley jump out of the corner of her eye as she flings Declan onto the hood of his car. People are routinely startled by her strength, and she’s proud of this fact. After all, it has cost her enough. 

Whatever Declan’s weaknesses, he’s always been fast to get back up and he practically bounces off the hood and propels himself at her almost before she’s ready for him, but years of practice have her fists back up and ready to connect with his chest as he moves toward her. Ronan hears the back door of Nino’s swing open behind her as Declan goes down, and Gansey’s voice calling her name. It’s enough of a distraction that she can’t even think of deflecting the left hook coming at her until it’s far too late and pain is spiderwebbing up from the corner of her jaw through her head. She swears without thinking about it, the words like blood in her mouth, spit out more by instinct than purpose. Pushing off with her back foot, she rams her head up against Declan’s chin and is about to take another swing at him when she feels Gansey’s arms wrapping around her chest and holding her arm back where it is. Declan’s fist, aiming for Ronan’s head, connects with Gansey’s cheek and throws their connected bodies off balance, allowing Ronan to free herself. Declan grabs her skull and she moves her arm up in a swift motion to catch him on the chin with her elbow. Grunting in pain, Declan releases her and she grabs his shirtfront to slam him against the passenger side door. “Not the fucking car!” He shouts before his head snaps back against the window and he crumples. 

As Declan falls, Gansey steps between them and shoves Ronan away from the car and her brother. Only Gansey’s years on the rowing team give her the upper body strength to break Ronan’s stance, and even so Ronan regains her balance only a few steps back, where she stops and puts her hands on her knees, breathing heavily. Behind Gansey, Declan is getting back to his feet, his hand on the back of his head where it hit the car window. When Ronan straightens, Gansey steps forward and puts a restraining hand on her shoulder. Her voice is stern when she turns to address Declan. “What are you doing here?”

“Ashley needed the restroom. I can stop where I like, can’t I?”

“You shouldn’t have.”

Declan raises his arms in a gesture of surrender. “Fine,” he says, and spits blood on the pavement. Ronan wishes she could believe she knocked one of his teeth out, but she knows she hasn’t. “She’s your dog, you leash her.” The implication of bitch beneath his words makes Ronan tremble with anger under Gansey’s hand. “Keep her from getting kicked out of Aglionby. I wash my hands of her.”

“I wish,” Ronan said, pressing forward. 

The withering and condescending look Declan shoots her is like lemon on a wound. “You’re such a piece of shit, Ronan, if mom could see you –”

It’s those words that make her rush past Gansey with a scream of rage, grabbing Declan by his dark, gelled hair and preparing to drag him to the ground to finally give him the beating he deserves when Gansey’s arms come round her chest again. Gansey actually manages to lift her off the ground, her legs bicycling, her foot striking once at Declan’s chest before both she and Gansey crash to the ground. Gansey is back up in a second but Ronan stays on the asphalt, propped on her elbows, catching her breath. She hears their conversation as if distantly, still thinking how fucking dare he talk about our mother, how fucking could he. As if their mother would have been anything but proud of her. But as soon as she thinks that, she knows it’s a lie and she has to turn her face away. She thinks she’s gonna puke. 

“Ask her if she’s gonna get by with a B this year,” she hears Declan saying as she pulls herself to her feet. “Do you ever go to class, Ronan?”

Gansey puts a hand on Ronan’s arm, but when she speaks, it’s to Declan. “I’m not saying you’re wrong. I’m just saying –” She pauses for a brief moment, then continues. “I’m just saying you can’t replace Nora Lynch, and you should quit trying.”

And just like that, Ronan goes very quiet. Looking up at Declan, she can see the fight has gone out of him as well, but for a different reason. Ronan’s grief for her mother is a riptide, ready to pull her under and paralyze her at the mention of Nora’s name, but it’s different for Declan. It’s not pride or a proprietary nature that make Ronan believe that she had loved their mother most – it’s simple honesty. But unlike Ronan, Declan feels the need to take over as the head of the family, and any reminder of his failure to fill his mother’s shoes is as effective as a punch to the gut in silencing him. 

Ronan thinks maybe Gansey and Declan might be talking but if they are, she doesn’t know what they’re saying. She is either very far from her body or very small inside it and the fact that she isn’t sure which frightens her a little. She thinks, with a distant sort of sadness, of how recently she was intensely alive and present. It’s always been that way with her – there’s nothing like pain to bring her to life. On the rare occasions she indulges her desire to consider the disastrous state of her mind, she wonders what it says about her that she can’t imagine a kiss to be a more ecstatic experience than a punch to the face, but she has no answers. Some automatic process brings her hand up to the corner of her jaw where Declan had hit her earlier and a combination of the pain of her own fingers on the bruise and the memory of the punch itself does a little to lessen the distance between herself and her body. Her head comes up and she looks Declan in the eye, though she thinks that he must see nothing behind the wideness of her pupils. Not that he would know the difference between the times that she is inhabiting herself and the times that she isn’t. “I’ll never forgive you,” she says, quietly, but leaving no room in her tone for him to doubt her sincerity. 

“Wouldn’t mean a lot coming from you anymore,” he says, and goes around to the driver’s side. She hears him say “I don’t wanna talk about it,” to Ashley before they drive off. The familiar mixture of anger and jealousy and hurt presses like an elbow in her ribs, but only for a moment. All of a sudden, she feels the pain in every part of her body that Declan had hit that night. 

She turns to Gansey, knowing that Gansey doesn’t have the option of being sweet and forgiving just now, however much Ronan may need it. “Fix it,” Gansey says, and the edge of hardness in her voice momentarily makes Ronan into a small and pitiful creature.

Very softly she says, “I wanna quit.” What she means is: I want to lie down on this pavement and either bleed out or be rescued.

“Just one more year,” Gansey says.

Ronan grits her teeth, aggravated that Gansey has failed to fully understand her. “I don’t wanna do this for one more year,” she says, feeling anger blooming up in her again, a life force as dangerous as it is vital. She kicks against the curb again, needing some release. “Another year and then what? I grow my hair out and start wearing pantsuits, play the politician like Declan? I can’t be that fucking –” Ronan doesn’t know how to finish that sentence. Good. Straight. Fake.

Gansey’s voice is full of a measured patience. “Just graduate and do whatever you want.”

Ronan chokes on a laugh, feeling with some surprise that there are tears pricking at the backs of her eyes. Gansey says it like it’s such a simple thing. “I don’t know what I want,” she says. “I don’t know what the hell I am.” She says it with anger and frustration, like it isn’t the thought that follows her around on nights when she can’t sleep, assuring her she would be better off dead. She is a creature without ambition and without use. 

She doesn’t know what to do with her body so she opens the passenger door of the Camaro and gets in. Gansey grabs the door before Ronan can pull it shut and looks down at her. “Ronan, you promised me.”

Ronan closes her eyes and thinks about every point of pain in her body. “I know.”

“Don’t forget,” Gansey says, and releases the door. Ronan slams it and huddles in her seat. Through the windshield she can see Gansey walk over to where Eve has been silently waiting. She wonders how long Eve was there, if she saw any of the fight. A useless thought. She and Gansey are talking quietly together, and the idea of them talking about her, about the problem of Ronan Lynch, makes her stomach turn to acid again, so she looks away, at the inside of the Camaro. She can remember being in this car before her mother died. She can almost remember what it had felt like, but it’s like trying to remember a smell, or a piece of melody you’ve only heard once. The shape of it exists in her mind, but without content. Time passes in a slow, imprecise way until Ronan is pulled back to the present moment by the sound of car doors opening. Gansey and Leah climb into the car, leaving Eve to ride home on her bike. Gansey turns the keys and they pull out of the parking lot. Ronan can’t imagine the feeling in the car being more different from when they had arrived. 

Mercifully, Leah begins a conversation with her usual simple goodwill. “Gansey, you should tell Ronan about that waiter you were talking to when I came in to get you.”

“Oh God,” Gansey says, cringing, and some of the tension in the car falls away. “It was a fiasco.”

“You were flirting with him?” Ronan asks, ready to make fun of Gansey though she still feels essentially like shit. 

“I was flirting with him for Eve,” Gansey clarifies. “And it was awful, I don’t know where exactly I went wrong but somehow we ended up talking about how I shouldn’t assume he wanted to talk to a girl and how just because straight people are the majority doesn’t mean it’s the default and how having money has apparently made me believe I own everyone. God, I felt awful.” 

There’s sincere shame and a note of her frequent anxiety in Gansey’s voice, so for once Ronan doesn’t tease her. She feels enough like an asshole tonight. 

“It was pretty bad,” Leah confirms. “He was cute, too. But it’s not like Eve would ever have talked to him on her own.” 

“I felt awful,” Gansey says again. They all three drift into silence and nothing more is said on the drive back to Monmouth Manufacturing.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She moves to her bed and curls up around the bottle, pressing her forehead to the cool glass. Declan doesn’t know a damn thing about her, and Gansey would agree with that. She tries to remember how their conversation had gone before Ronan had thrown the first punch, but she can’t put it together – she just remembers bits and pieces, insults and jabs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for gendered & homophobic slurs, alcohol use, thoughts of suicide

When they arrive back at Monmouth Manufacturing, Ronan makes a beeline for her room and locks herself in. For a moment she sits with her back to the door, breathing deeply. The bruises and cuts from the fight are really starting to hurt, and this should help, but it isn’t doing enough. Her mind won’t stop working, going over and over Declan’s words, Gansey’s mention of her mother, the way Gansey and Eve were talking without her by the back door to Nino’s. 

If mom could see you. What would her mother think if she saw Ronan tonight? That she had been working on her right hook, that she packed a more solid punch than she had when Nora had been alive. That something had gone terribly wrong in her daughter’s heart. That her family would never be whole again. 

Ronan jerks upright and moves to her dresser to retrieve a whiskey bottle from the underwear drawer, trying to ignore the slight shaking of her hand as she unscrews the lid and takes a swig. The sharpness of it in her mouth immediately settles something inside her. Like thorns on her tongue, she thinks, and smiles. She moves to her bed and curls up around the bottle, pressing her forehead to the cool glass. Declan doesn’t know a damn thing about her, and Gansey would agree with that. She tries to remember how their conversation had gone before Ronan had thrown the first punch, but she can’t put it together – she just remembers bits and pieces, insults and jabs. Somewhere in there she had said something about Ashley and Declan had said something about her being jealous, because there wasn’t a girl in town who would sleep with her. She can remember the tone of his voice, how he spit the words out. She takes another sip. How close he had come to calling her a bitch tonight. She remembers the first time he had done it, and the feel of her fist colliding with his cheekbone afterward. And she remembers too the first time he had called her a dyke, and the fact that that time, she hadn’t hit him, and she still regrets it, and she takes another drink. At some point he had started in on her grades and she had said there was no point to her working hard in high school since she didn’t want to go to college. He had asked if there was anything she did want to do, since she had yet to show any evidence of being good at anything. She takes another drink. Now she remembers – that’s when she had hit him. 

Screwing the lid back on the whiskey bottle and laying it down on her pillow, she gets on the ground and lies flat to peer under the door. There’s still a light on outside. Damn Gansey and her insomnia. She crawls back into her bed and opens the bottle, staring into it for a moment before drinking again. Sometimes it seems as though Declan is telling her to hurry up and die already, or to go bury herself where he won’t have to hear from her again, or better yet to find a way to erase herself and her history from the earth altogether, to excise herself from his family and his life, to simply cease existing. Taking a big gulp of whiskey, she wonders if he would be relieved if she killed herself. After all, he thinks she wants to. Like Gansey, he had had no reason to doubt that her brush with death had been the result of a suicide attempt. Who would suspect that such wounds were inflicted by dream monsters rather than her own desperate hands? She takes another big drink and lays her head down on her pillow. The world is beginning to soften. Maybe Declan would see it as a final act of rebellion, one last smear on the Lynch name, one last cause for shame before he was rid of her forever. This is a masochistic train of thought, but Ronan can’t seem to leave it. 

Something in the lighting of the room changes and Ronan sits bolt upright. She gets on the floor again and sees that the light has gone out in the main room. Gansey has gone to bed. She’ll be asleep soon, and then Ronan can sneak past her – she’s done it before, many times. She just has to wait long enough to let her fall asleep first. Moving silently across the room, Ronan pulls her boots on and laces them clumsily. She plucks her jacket from the floor and shrugs it on before sitting back down on her bed and holding her whiskey bottle, staring at the wall and waiting. After what seems to her like five minutes but, she realizes, may have been as few as two or as many as twenty, she turns off her light and carefully opens the door to her room and stands in the darkness with one hand on the doorframe to steady herself and listens. Gansey’s breathing is low and even. Safe. 

Slowly and carefully Ronan makes her way across the wide expanse of the room, pausing for a moment by Gansey’s bed to look down at her. Her soft blonde hair is spread across the pillow and the habitual anxious expression of her face is present even in sleep. Under the influence of the whiskey, Ronan feels even more sharply than usual how terribly she loves Gansey, how instantly she would agree to die for her. Declan is right, she thinks – she is Gansey’s dog, or if not, something close to it. Ready to take a bullet for her, ready to follow her anywhere, to obey any command. Ready to do anything but lie for her. With some effort, Ronan looks away from her and, a little shakily, walks to the door and down the stairs. 

Outside, in the chilly air of the spring night, she feels a little more steady. She puts one hand in the pocket of her jacket and holds the other at her side, gripping the bottle of whiskey. Automatically, she turns her path toward the church, making her way in long strides, her shoulders set and her gaze dead ahead. She hopes that she looks sufficiently like a woman not to be fucked with that no one will pay her any mind. The walk through town sobers her and sets her thinking again, so she increases her pace. Henrietta, so beloved by Gansey, so hated by Eve, is a blank to her. It is simply, like every place other than the Barns, not home. Not Home USA, she thinks, and smiles spitefully to herself. 

Finally, she arrives at the church. The heavy front doors are unlocked as they always are, open to allow anyone in who might need a place to spend the night. This is not home to her, but it’s the closest thing there is – familiar, beloved, and a little frightening. Ronan steps inside and knows immediately that it’s mercifully empty. She dips her hand into the font and crosses herself then slides into one of the back pews, settling the bottle between her knees. She believes without doubt that God inhabits this place, that what she is doing now is an act of blasphemy. It’s a drop in the ocean of her sin, though, she thinks, and so she fails to feel anything but pitiful in her rebellion. For a moment she folds her hands and tries to pray, but there are no words. Instead, she closes her eyes and tips her head up and ceases to think. The whiskey has made her mind smooth as water. She isn’t sure how long she stays like that, but eventually she becomes aware of how deeply tired she is. Clumsily, she moves into a lying position, the back of her skull against the hard, smooth wood. Dear God, she thinks. Let me dream of something soft.

It takes her only a moment to fall asleep. She finds herself lying in the soft grass of the forest, Orphan Boy at her side. She sits and silently touches the top of his head, smiling at him. How welcome a sight he is tonight. Standing, she takes his hand and they walk in silence through the woods. They are dark and lovely and soothing, the perfect antidote to the evening. Ronan thinks that her prayer must have gotten through, for once in her life. Here, if nowhere else, Ronan knows exactly where to place her feet, is certain, by instinct more than memory, where tree roots disrupt the path, so she notices right away when there is an unfamiliar object on the forest floor ahead of them. She kneels before it while Orphan Boy stands a little behind her, his usual fearful self. It is a birds’ nest, woven from twigs with greater care and symmetry than any real nest. Ronan looks up, trying to see where it might have fallen from, scanning the canopy for birds to whom it might belong, but there is nothing. Looking into it, she sees a single egg, a small and speckled thing. She reaches out to feel it, and the surface is smooth and warm to the touch. Still alive, she thinks. It begins to rattle and her hand moves to her chest as she breathes in sharply. The egg is hatching. 

The process takes a little time, as the baby bird inside chips away at its shell. Finally, it emerges, small and whole and dark and very much alive. It opens its beady eyes and looks up at her and she knows with a certainty that has nothing to do with lessons in biology about imprinting, that this creature is now hers to care for. She reaches out and touches the top of its head as gently as she can, running her finger down its spine before lifting it, carefully, carefully into the palm of her hand. How warm it is, how small in her bruised hand. Something soft, she had prayed for. Apparently God is quite literal. Cupping it against her chest, she turns to Orphan Boy. He still looks uncertain about the baby bird, but her attention is too absorbed by it to notice much. The beating of its heart is rapid and strong.

Wake up, dude. The words are in English and from outside the forest and Ronan knows what that means. She feels, as she never has before, the necessity of bringing the bird out of the dream with her, and so she focuses as hard as she can on holding its tiny body in her hand as the dream stretches and dissolves around her. This is her hand, she thinks, her real hand, holding this real bird. A raven, she thinks, with a smile – anything but coincidence. 

And then she’s blinking up at Gansey, whose hand is on her shoulder, and in her hand (her real hand, she thinks) she can feel the beating of the raven’s heart, just as rapid and strong as in the dream. She had been right to trust in its reality. Awake, she is still drunk and she can feel the beginnings of a headache and nausea. 

“You bastard,” Gansey says, but her voice is too full of relief for Ronan to take it to heart. 

“I couldn’t dream,” Ronan says. She means, though she can’t say it to Gansey, that she can’t take the risk, on a night like this, of dreaming in Monmouth, where others might get hurt by the things that sometimes make it out of her head. Seeing how real Gansey’s fear had been, she says, a little softer, “I promised you it wouldn’t happen again.”

“Yeah, but you’re a liar.”

Ronan rolls her head to the side and looks up at Gansey. “I think you’re mistaking me for my brother.”

“You know, when I said I didn’t want you getting drunk at Monmouth, I didn’t mean I wanted you to go out and drink somewhere else.”

Smiling lazily, Ronan says simply, “Pot calling the kettle black.”

“I drink, I do not get drunk.”

Like a real southern lady, Ronan thinks, though she doesn’t say it.

“What’s that,” Gansey asks, her eyes finally catching the peculiar way Ronan’s hand is clutched to her chest around the raven. She reaches out to peel Ronan’s fingers away, but jerks back as her hand makes contact with the warm body in Ronan’s grip. “Christ! Is that – a bird?”

“Raven,” Ronan says, sitting up carefully and holding her palm so that Gansey can see it, but still close to her chest. “Maybe a crow but I doubt it. I – yeah, I seriously doubt it. Corvus Corex.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Lena & Angie for proofing!


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ronan stumbles a little and pulls Chainsaw closer to her chest, a useless but protective motion. Gansey’s hand reaches out in an instant to seize Ronan’s elbow and steady her. Gansey has always been irritable about Ronan’s drinking, always ready to tell her off for her dependence, but she is the most patient of disciplinarians. Gansey has sat by her side on the bathroom floor, brought her food and water and carried her to her bed despite her continued insistence that, “one day, Ronan, no one will be there to take care of you.” Ronan is pretty sure that Gansey always will be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This project has a [blog](http://lady-trc.tumblr.com/)! I've posted my writing [playlist](http://8tracks.com/leesbees/lady-trc) for this fic, as well as fancasts for the characters. All chapters will be cross-posted there.

Gansey is staring down at the bird in Ronan’s cupped palm. “Where did it come from?” She asks.

“I found it,” Ronan replies, simply enough. It isn’t a lie, not exactly. She had found it. In an imaginary forest that exists in her head, yes, but she had found it. The method of extraction is not a necessary part of the explanation.

“People find pennies, or car keys, or four leaf clovers,” Gansey says. Ronan smiles. This is a habit of Gansey’s that she’s always found ridiculous -- the need to point out the improbability of a situation even as it’s existing in front of her. The improbability of Ronan finding a raven in no way changes the fact that Ronan is sitting with a baby bird in the palm of her hand, but Gansey nevertheless feels the need to point out the strangeness of it. 

“And ravens. You’re just jealous cause--” Ronan pauses, feeling certain that she had had a thought in mind when she had begun the sentence, but now absolutely clueless as to what it had been. Instead, she tacks on the only logical conclusion she can come up with.   
“Cause you didn’t find one too.” The bird shits on the pew beside Ronan, and she looks down at it for a moment with the vague thought that leaving bird shit on a church pew will not do any good for her already blemished track record with God before wiping it away with a bulletin. The whiskey has left her brain foggy and unable to focus and she can’t quite put the pieces together to figure out what to do with the bulletin, so she hands it to Gansey, who takes it with a sigh of annoyance.

“What if I implement a no pets policy at the apartment?”

“Well hell man, you can’t just throw out Leah like that.” She grins at her own joke, but Gansey only looks a little perplexed. 

“Come on, we’re going back. Get up.”

Ronan stands clumsy but carefully, looking down at the little bird who is hunched, frightened and confused, in her hand. “Get used to some turbulence you little bastard.”

“You can’t name it that,” Gansey says with a touch of maternal exasperation in her voice. 

“His name’s Chainsaw,” Ronan says. She feels as though she had not so much chosen the name as found it. As though the raven had been born with a name already assigned. She squints into the darkness in the back of the church and sees Leah, barely visible, huddled against the back wall. “Leah, you’re creepy as hell back there.”

“I thought you weren’t coming,” Gansey says, looking a little startled.

“The apartment was creepy,” Leah says, rubbing her arm.

“Freak,” Ronan replies, with only a little malice. 

Gansey turns to Ronan, her eyebrows furrowed with intellectual concern. “Where did you say you found that bird again?”

“In my head.” Ronan laughs as she says it, knowing she would only say this drunk, knowing that strangely enough, she can say it safely, without a fear that her friends will guess from this her most dangerous and most guarded secret. Nothing like the truth for deflecting suspicion. 

“Dangerous place,” Gansey comments. 

“Not for a chainsaw.” Ronan stumbles a little and pulls Chainsaw closer to her chest, a useless but protective motion. Gansey’s hand reaches out in an instant to seize Ronan’s elbow and steady her. Gansey has always been irritable about Ronan’s drinking, always ready to tell her off for her dependence, but she is the most patient of disciplinarians. Gansey has sat by her side on the bathroom floor, brought her food and water and carried her to her bed despite her continued insistence that, “one day, Ronan, no one will be there to take care of you.” Ronan is pretty sure that Gansey always will be.

“We should go down to the bridge, I think that’s where Eve will be,” Gansey says.

Ronan’s head snaps up. She suddenly feels much more sober. “You called Eve?”

Gansey’s face when she turns to Ronan is a strange mix of irritation and misery. “We had to, Ronan. The difference between one person looking and two seemed to me like it might be the difference --”

“Got it,” Ronan says, cutting her off. She doesn’t want to hear it, and she knows Gansey doesn’t really want to say it. With Leah in tow they make their way down to the bridge over the river that winds down across the edge of town. Sure enough, Eve is there. Ronan’s ribcage seems to tighten around her chest when she sees Eve, her shoes and her bike abandoned by the shore, ankle deep in water with her pants rolled up around her calves. The strangeness of watching Eve looking for Ronan’s own floating body would have made the moment surreal even without the lingering whiskey in Ronan’s blood.

“Eve,” Gansey calls, and Eve looks up. 

“Oh, thank god,” she says, seeing the three of them on the bank of the river. She makes her way back to dry land and picks up her shoes and bicycle, coming to join them. 

“Thank you for coming out,” Gansey says. “And I’m sorry I called you for a false alarm.”

Eve shrugs. “You couldn’ta known.” 

Ronan isn’t sure if it’s the implication of the danger Eve has put herself in by joining the search or how close this feels to her friends discussing her supposed suicide attempt in front of her without actually acknowledging her that makes her insides crawl more. Either way, she wants to take another swig from the bottle she’s still carrying, but she knows better than to do it with the others around. 

As they begin to climb the grassy slope by the river back up to the sidewalk, Eve peers at Ronan. “What do you have in your hand?”

“Whiskey,” Ronan says, deadpan.

Eve isn’t taking the bait. “Your other hand.”

Very carefully, Ronan opens the hand still clutched to her chest just enough to make the baby bird visible.

“It’s a raven,” Gansey says softly. “Ronan found it.”

“I don’t like its chances.”

Ronan looks up in time to see Gansey shoot Eve the kind of warning look that’s she’s used to being on the receiving end of. 

“I’m good with animals, actually,” Ronan says, looking back down at Chainsaw. She isn’t taking the bait either. “They’re simple.”

Eve ties the laces of her shoes together and slings them over one of the handlebars of her bike, swinging a leg over it. “Anyway, I should head home. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Bye Eve. Thanks again,” Gansey says. 

Eve pushes off and turns around in the street, pedaling away from them barefoot, her sleep-messy hair floating behind her. Ronan looks away.

“Time to get you home, too,” Gansey says, putting an arm around Ronan’s shoulder. 

“And then we get up in the morning and do it all again.”

Gansey’s voice is forceful and serious when she says, “Yes.”   
They walk back to Monmouth, time and the cool air of the spring night doing a little of the work of sobering Ronan. Some nights, she dreads the end of drunkenness. Some nights, the thought of it keeps her drinking. Tonight, she wants a clear head again. She feels somehow emptied and clean and whole -- a rare sensation and one she wants to hold on to. One she wants to remember. Somehow, she has ended up surrounded by good things. The night smell of grass in the spring is good, and so is the weight of Gansey’s arm across her shoulders, and so is the quick, steady fluttering of the bird’s heartbeat in her hand, pulsing against her sternum where she holds him close against her. There’s an indescribable thrill to bringing something living out of a dream. Living creatures, even small ones, even young ones, are exhaustingly complex in their construction. How strange to think that, with care and luck, this bird will grow up to fly. How strange to think that she, in her own sleeping mind, had reconstructed the mechanics of flight. 

They arrive at home and Ronan follows the others up the stairs, her feet still sluggish. Leah has already vanished into her room when Ronan makes it up to the apartment. 

“You’ll sleep okay?” Gansey asks.

Ronan nods and crosses to her room, closing the door behind her. In the comfort and closeness of her room, she lifts Chainsaw up to look him in the eye. 

“Hey buddy,” she says, and the raven makes a sort of half-formed squawk back at her. 

The rest of the night actually involves very little sleep for Ronan. Instead, she spends the hours before sunrise researching, making a makeshift nest with a tshirt, sneaking out to the front yard to dig worms and mashing up said worms to feed them to Chainsaw with a pair of tweezers. The main result of her research is the knowledge that she’ll have to find a way to bring the bird to school with her. For the first six weeks he’ll have to be fed every two hours, as long as he functions the same way other baby ravens do, and there’s no reason to suppose he won’t. Dream things, in Ronan’s experience, function in unnervingly similar ways to real ones. She thinks of her childhood, filled with almost perfect counterfeits. When she holds Chainsaw, she thinks that the only thing that actually makes him different from a real baby raven is that he is more hers than any animal born of reality could be. Chainsaw is hers like a child and, while she’s never thought of herself as possessing much of a maternal instinct, she doesn’t have any other explanation for the way she feels when she holds his soft-feathered form to her face. When she does fall asleep a little more than an hour before her alarm is set to go off, it’s with Chainsaw sleeping in the tshirt nest next to her pillow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Angie & Lena for proofing!


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She had first noticed Eve’s absence in second period and drawn the easy conclusion that her father had caught her sneaking back into the house. Or had been waiting for her when she got there. The idea of Robert Parrish periodically opening the door to his daughter’s room to check that she is still in her bed makes Ronan’s gut turn, and any attention she might otherwise have been willing to pay to precalculus is turned to imagining herself killing him in vivid detail. Ronan Lynch hates a lot of people, but there’s a special brand of rage she reserves for people who hit her friends.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for: implied abuse & imagined violence. Chapter 6 AKA the one where Ronan spends an entire chapter thinking about beating the shit out of people.

Eve isn’t at school the next day. The combination of her absence, Gansey’s guilt and anxiety over its likely cause, and the fact that she has a baby raven who needs regular feeding carefully nested in her bookbag is giving Ronan significantly more stress than she’s generally comfortable with. 

She had first noticed Eve’s absence in second period and drawn the easy conclusion that her father had caught her sneaking back into the house. Or had been waiting for her when she got there. The idea of Robert Parrish periodically opening the door to his daughter’s room to check that she is still in her bed makes Ronan’s gut turn, and any attention she might otherwise have been willing to pay to precalculus is turned to imagining herself killing him in vivid detail. Ronan Lynch hates a lot of people, but there’s a special brand of rage she reserves for people who hit her friends. 

On her way to Latin, she spots Gansey across the quad and catches up to her, hitting her in the shoulder from behind. “Where’s Eve?” She asks it even though she knows it will heighten Gansey’s anxiety. Gansey must know she isn’t here, since she usually picks her up to bring her to Aglionby. 

“She didn’t come in with me today. You haven’t seen her yet?”

“Wasn’t in class.”

One of Gansey’s rowing teammates calls to her and waves. Gansey’s hurried wave back irritates Ronan for a reason she can’t understand. The happiness of their classmates grates at Ronan and she thinks that at this moment she resents every single person on this campus who has a happy family life. 

Gansey is chewing on her fingernails, always a sign of deep distress with her. She likes to keep her nails short but neat, filed down to a clean line. That she would resort to this method of handling her nervousness worries Ronan. “I tried calling at the house.”

“Poor girl needs a cell,” Ronan says. Gansey doesn’t want to respond to this, and Ronan knows it, so they keep walking in silence.

From across the quad, Ronan hears a well-hated voice. “Lynch! Lynch, I’m gonna fuck you up.” It’s Josey Kavinsky, legendary counterfeiter and the easiest target in Henrietta if you’re looking for trouble, which Ronan often is. Ronan has long harbored a suspicion that Kavinsky is screwing her best friend, Prokopenko, the only girl Ronan has ever met who regularly puts glitter in her hair, but she presents herself as aggressively heterosexual and Ronan isn’t the type to publicly question that. 

“What’s that about?” Gansey asks, her tone shifting from worried to accusatory.

“Some people don’t take losing very well,” Ronan says evasively.

“Was that Kavinsky? Don’t tell me you’ve been street racing again.”

“Don’t ask me then.” The most profoundly irritating thing about Gansey is her continual campaign to reform Ronan. Ronan knows that even if she tried, she could never make Gansey understand the need that racing fulfills for her, and she knows that, honest as she is, she doesn’t have the guts to tell Gansey what she would do if anyone ever cut her off. Her fist tightens around the strap of her bookbag. She’s a fucking coward. 

“Why are you carrying that bag?” Gansey says, peering at Ronan suspiciously. She shouldn’t have been fidgeting with it so much. Now she can see the realization dawning on Gansey’s face. “Oh my god, you’ve got that bird in there.”

Ronan isn’t in the habit of being apologetic anyway, but she feels entirely justified in this particular case. “He has to be fed every two hours.” 

Gansey glances up at Ronan’s face, momentarily impressed. “How do you know that?”

“Jesus, Gansey,” Ronan says, rolling her eyes as she pushes the door to Borden House open. “The internet.”

“If you get caught with that thing -- if it dies in your bag, I forbid you to throw it out in a classroom.”

“He. It’s a he.” Ronan resists the urge to check inside the bag. She’s aware that she’s displacing some of her worry about Eve onto Chainsaw, but she doesn’t plan on stopping. Gansey is still talking, saying something about the bird, but Ronan isn’t listening, and to be fair, she doesn’t think Gansey is paying much attention to her own words. She has that look she gets when she’s rambling about something while thinking obsessively about something else. 

They make their way to their usual seats in the back of Latin class. Whelk makes the mistake of making eye contact with Ronan and Ronan holds her gaze with her trademark stare that can unsettle anyone except Gansey. The discomfort it produces is especially edifying in this case given how thoroughly Ronan dislikes her. She’s a creep, and Ronan has always gotten a vibe of general sliminess and dishonesty from her. 

When Whelk looks away, Ronan turns back to Gansey. “What are you going to do about Eve?”

“I guess I’ll go over there after school.” As anxious as Gansey is, she is not easily daunted, but she looks daunted now.

“She’s probably sick,” Ronan says, but as she and Gansey look at each other, she knows that neither of them can believe that, that it’s only an excuse to try to put their minds off it, that nothing either of them says can protect Eve from what actually happened. 

*

That afternoon, after school, Ronan waits in the parking lot outside Monmouth for Gansey to return. It’s a promising sign that she’s been gone for a while -- if Eve’s father had just chased her away, she’d be back already. The passing time means that Gansey has probably found Eve and is talking to her. It’s a logical train of thought, and Ronan repeats it to herself as she waits with Chainsaw, bundled in his tshirt nest, in her lap. Gansey will be fine, and so will Eve, but she doesn’t like waiting. 

When the Pig finally pulls up, Eve is in the front seat, and the sight of her releases more tension than Ronan was even aware she was carrying in her body. Her face is turned in such a way that Ronan suspects she is trying to hide a bruise, as though Ronan is somehow not going to see it. As though turning herself away from Ronan like that is going to make what had happened any less obvious. 

Ronan opens the door to the back seat open and gets in with more care than usual, given that she’s carrying Chainsaw. “Eve,” she says, as they begin to drive away from Monmouth.

“You going to bring that bird with you everywhere?” Eve asks. 

Ronan can see her face in the rearview mirror. She isn’t surprised by the bruise, but by how much of Eve’s face it takes up. Part of her imagines taking Eve back to Monmouth, getting her an ice pack from the freezer and pressing it against her cheek (twenty minutes on, twenty minutes off) until the swelling goes down a little, but a larger and louder part of her imagines strangling Robert Parrish slowly. She thinks about her thumb digging into the side of his throat, her nails just barely breaking his skin, his lips turning purple. Constructing this mental image in rich and loving detail does a little to calm her, but it’s still an effort not to punch the window or the back of Eve’s seat. Gansey seems mostly alright, and even though Ronan knows she’s had some time to process the sight of Eve, seeing her calmly driving makes Ronan want to drag her out of the car and smash her head against the hood. The desire to do violence to Gansey is a rare and uncomfortable one, but she can’t help it. This isn’t something they talk about, it isn’t something they’re allowed to talk about, so Ronan knows rationally that Gansey doesn’t have much of a choice than to appear unaffected, but at this moment, Ronan’s mind is spinning uselessly with anger and violent energy and she’s pretty sure she’ll sock the next person who looks at her wrong. She wants to put her head between her knees. Living like this is miserable, but it’s impossible to imagine herself without her anger. What would she be then but a hollow thing, unable to stop mourning her dead mother, unable to reach her silent father, her brother a terrible enigma, her only comfort her sisters: one biological, three otherwise. Four sisters who, try as they might, cannot undo the fact that she found her mother’s brutalized corpse, could not make her sleep seven consecutive hours, could not take back all the shitty things her brother has ever said about her. And she can’t take back any of Eve’s past either, not the bruises or the insults or the wrecked self-esteem, the pride she carries so close to her chest because it’s the only thing that’s actually hers. Sometimes Eve will sit in class with the tip of her pencil pressed to the paper but perfectly still, her entire expression distant. Ronan is pretty sure that she and Eve go to the same thoughtless place when their minds become uninhabitable. She wishes she could hug Eve and make things a little better. She wishes she were better at touching people without hurting them.

Gansey finally breaks the silence. “So, we’re headed to the psychic’s place.”

“Why are we doing this,” Ronan says, without looking up. Her forehead is pressed to the cool glass of the window, her eyes following the trees by the side of the road as they rush past.

“Eve and I have been talking about this. We think a psychic might know something about the ley lines. Might have some piece of information you wouldn’t find in a book. Energy is, after all, their area of expertise.” 

The ley lines and the entire quest feel ludicrous to Ronan right now. She’s never doubted the reality of the lines, never doubted that the power of a mysterious dead queen prevented Gansey from dying seven years ago, but the magic Gansey is chasing feels utterly irrelevant to their lives. On her good days, it feels to Ronan like a way to cope, and one significantly less dangerous and unhealthy than most of the ones she employs, and she suspects that Eve feels the same. But on her bad days, it feels more like they’re just a bunch of pathetic, obsessive teenagers searching for magic because they can’t face real life. Why are we doing this.

Gansey pulls up to the sidewalk and shuts the engine off. “300 Fox Way,” she announces. “According to Eve’s sources, the best psychics in town. We’ll go in, we’ll pay for a reading, and we’ll ask about the ley lines. Ronan, don’t be rude.”

Ronan glares at her through the rearview mirror. Today, she doesn’t feel like making any promises.

They get out of the Camaro and make their way up the walk. A rather wild garden populates most of the front lawn and the house itself is the kind of place that Ronan’s mother would have described as having “real character.” It looks a little crooked to Ronan. The colors are varied and deeply saturated. They mount the steps to the front door and stand for a moment on the welcome mat. Gansey turns to them with her best confidence-inspiring smile and says, “Everybody ready?” Ronan shuffles her feet a little, which Gansey chooses to interpret as assent, and Eve nods. Gansey rings the doorbell and steps back a pace to stand between them.

A short woman with thick, dark hair and a smile that says she’s used to welcoming people into her home opens the door. Ronan can tell right away the house has a distinctive smell, and even though it’s not at all similar to the smell of the Barns, she’s hit with a terrible wave of nostalgia and homesickness. Gansey puts on the smile she uses to turn lead to gold says, “Sorry that I’m late.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Lena & Angie for proofing!
> 
> Tumblr for this project: lady-trc  
> My fandom tumblr: psychotic-adam-parrish


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Blue steps forward to take the pack of cards from his mother and shuffles. It’s a theatrical process and Ronan thinks: this boy has been well trained. She wonders what it would be like to grow up in a family of psychics, surrounded by this kind of thing. Ronan can’t decide if she doesn’t believe in psychics or if she does believe in them and just doesn’t like them. She may be far from a perfect Catholic, but seventeen years of churchgoing and faith are enough to make this entire situation more than a little uncomfortable.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for a (relatively mild) description of a panic attack

“Sorry that I’m late,” Gansey says. “Will it be a problem?”

“Well, it’s not too late, come into the reading room. Can I get some names?”

“I’m Gansey, this is Ronan, and this is Eve. Where do you want us -- in there?” Gansey is gesturing toward a room off of the hallway, where the woman who had let them in is now standing.

“In there. I’m Maura, this is Persephone and Calla,” she says, gesturing to two women behind her. “And that’s my son, Blue. He’ll be present for the reading, if you don’t mind.” The woman nods toward the staircase leading down to the hall and all three of the girls turn to see a boy wearing a baby blue shirt with what appear to be actual chicken feathers sewn to the chest by hand. His hair forms a dark and curly cloud around his head that is halfheartedly restrained by an assortment of multicolored plastic barrettes. He looks eccentric enough to be the son of a psychic, certainly, but he’s also inherited his mother’s dark skin and wide-set features, and Ronan thinks they somehow suit him better than her. 

“Hi again,” Gansey says, a note of sheepishness in her voice. “This is awkward.” 

Ronan turns to look at her, surprised. Gansey’s life is conducted mostly either at Aglionby, at Monmouth, or searching for Glyndower, and almost entirely with Ronan at her side. It’s hard to imagine when Gansey would have met this boy without her, much less accumulate enough baggage to have her greeting be this is awkward.

“You’ve met?” Maura says, and when Ronan turns to her, she’s glaring at the boy making his way down the remaining steps to the hallway. 

“Yes, we had a discussion about the dangers of making assumptions. I didn’t realize he was your son,” Gansey says as they make their way into the reading room. “Eve?” 

Pieces are starting to come together for Ronan -- the conversation with the waiter at Nino’s that Gansey had described and a guess, based on the way Gansey is looking at Eve, that the latter had ended up with the waiter’s number after all. Gansey, ever obsessive, would have noticed if she’d gotten a phone number that matched the one of the psychic, but it was plausible that Eve had not.

“I didn’t know either,” Eve says, knuckles pressed to the faded Coca-Cola logo on her shirt. She’s never dealt well with disappointment coming from Gansey. Turning to the boy on the stairs, she repeats herself. “I didn’t know, I swear.”

Blue asks, “What happened to your face?” 

Ten seconds earlier Ronan had been promising herself not to hate him simply for being liked by Eve, but now that she has a better reason, she gives in to the temptation. 

Eve shrugs and her discomfort, while palpable to Ronan and Gansey, is well masked. “Do you think it makes me look tougher?” 

The joke is a weak one, and it takes considerable effort for Ronan not to kick her heel against the doorframe behind her. “It makes you look like a loser.” She feels more malicious than she should. 

“Ronan,” Gansey says, sounding as she so often does like an exasperated parent, and this only makes the problem worse.

“I need everyone to sit down,” Maura, and almost everyone in the room immediately sits, startled at the sudden volume of her voice. Gansey, predictably, sits at the head of the table, with Eve at her right hand. Eve is worrying at the bruise on her face and Ronan wants to hit the boy for mentioning it. Instead she remains standing, sucking on her teeth and glaring at the only other person who didn’t sit -- Calla, a large woman with her hair bundled on top of her head and a gaze that matches Ronan’s.

“It is too damn loud in here,” Maura says, pressing her finger against the underside of her jaw.

Blue hesitates in the doorway next to Ronan, looking anxious. “Do I need to leave?”

“Why would you have to leave?” Gansey asks. The easy confidence with which she has entered the house is noticeably diminished, and the way she looks at Blue makes Ronan think she is both eager for his approval and uncertain of getting it. Ronan doesn’t like anything about this.

“He makes things louder. And you three are very loud already.” Maura is looking at the three girls as though they’ve done something wrong, but she doesn’t know quite what it is yet.

“What do you mean, very loud?” Gansey asks. Now that she has turned away from Blue, she seems a little more like her usual self. She’s in Inquisitive Gansey Mode, a scholar gathering new information.

“I mean that there is something about your energies that is very…” The sentence trails off as she looks at Persephone and Ronan sees them having the kind of nonverbal conversation she’s used to seeing between Gansey and Eve. No special psychic powers necessary for that.

“One at a time?” Persephone asks. Her voice is high like a child’s though she seems like the oldest of the women in the room.  
“One-offs. You’ll have to, or some of them will have to leave,” Calla says. “They’re just too noisy.” Ronan recognizes from her mother the voice of a heavy smoker and feels another pang of misery and homesickness, this time not only for the Barns but for the Barns inhabited by Nora Lynch.

“What is a one-off? How is it different from a regular reading?” Gansey asks.

“It doesn’t matter what they want,” Calla says, addressing Maura. “It is what it is. Take it or leave it.” 

“A one-off is where each of you pick just one card and we interpret,” Maura tells Gansey.

Gansey turns to Eve and they, too, consult without words. “Whatever you’re comfortable with,” Gansey says, looking back at Maura.

Maura takes a pack of cards and is about to begin shuffling it when Persephone interrupts. “Wait -- have Blue deal it.” 

Blue steps forward to take the pack of cards from his mother and shuffles. It’s a theatrical process and Ronan thinks: this boy has been well trained. She wonders what it would be like to grow up in a family of psychics, surrounded by this kind of thing. Ronan can’t decide if she doesn’t believe in psychics or if she does believe in them and just doesn’t like them. She may be far from a perfect Catholic, but seventeen years of churchgoing and faith are enough to make this entire situation more than a little uncomfortable. 

Blue spreads the cards in front of Eve, and she draws one, looking up at Blue rather than at the deck, and turns it face up on the table. Depicted on it is a woman standing blindfolded with two swords crossed in front of her chest.

“Two of swords,” Maura says. “You’re avoiding a hard choice. Acting by not acting. You’re ambitious. But you feel like someone’s asking something of you you’re not willing to give. Asking you to compromise your principles. Someone close to you. Your father, or brother --”

“Sister, I think,” Persephone says, and Maura’s frown lessens, as though she feels that the other woman’s words have clarified something crucial in the card’s message.

“I don’t have a sister, ma’am,” Eve says, but the flick of her eyes to Gansey is obvious. For a moment, Ronan wonders how the two of them became so close. It seems to her that it took her much longer to get that close to Gansey, and the trust that exists between the two of them far exceeds what there is between herself and Eve. It stings, but not as much as it had at first. She feels, standing behind them, like their dog or bodyguard. It’s somehow become comfortable, to be a little apart from them and yet to belong to both of them. 

“Do you want to ask a question?”

After a moment of consideration, Eve asks, “What’s the right choice?” 

Maura glances once more at Persephone then says, “There isn’t a right one. Just one you can live with. There might be a third option that would suit you better, but you’re not seeing it right now because you’re so involved with the other two. I’d guess from what I’m seeing that any other path would have to do with you going outside those other two options and making your own option. I’m also sensing you’re a very analytical thinker. You’ve spent a lot of time learning to ignore your emotions, but I don’t think this is a time for that.”

“Thanks,” Eve says. She seems genuine enough. This whole time she’s been listening attentively to Maura and nodding in agreement to various things she’s said. Ronan is annoyed at her for being so credulous. The answer seems generic and hackneyed to her, guidance without real guidance, and the comment about Eve being analytical is something anyone sufficiently practiced in reading people could pick up. She’s quickly losing what little faith she had in this exercise. These psychics don’t know anything she couldn’t have told Eve. 

Blue picks up the card Eve had drawn and slips it back into the deck, shuffling it again as he makes his way over to Ronan. He looks a little intimidated as he spreads the cards out with both hands and holds them, fanned, in front of her. She looks over his head at Maura and Persephone and crosses her arms. She’s done with this. “I’m not taking one. Tell me something true first.”

“Beg your pardon,” Calla says, looking even more hostile than she had before.

“Everything you’ve told her could apply to anybody. Anybody with a pulse has doubts. Anybody alive has argued with their brother or their father or their sister. Tell me something no one else can tell me. Don’t toss a playing card at me and spoon-feed me some Jungian bullshit. Tell me something specific.” 

All the women look uncomfortable, except Calla, who steps toward Ronan as Maura begins to say, “We don’t do specific --” 

Calla has placed two fingers on Ronan’s tattoo where it curves up above the collar of her shirt, and Ronan turns her head to look. 

“A secret killed your mother, and you know what it was,” she says, drawing her hand away. Calla had been glaring at her before, but now there’s a healthy portion of fear and confusion mixed in with the anger of her expression. Her voice lowers to a growl. “What are you?”

Ronan feels like her entire body has gone to ice. No one, no one, knows her secret and her mother’s. Her mother had made her swear never to tell, and so Ronan has never told, even when it puts her own life in danger to remain silent. The place where Calla had touched her burns. Does she really carry the knowledge of herself in her skin? She knows she won’t be able to forget the way Calla is looking at her, like she understands that Ronan is a monster, even if she doesn’t know what kind. Ronan smiles and the expression is a threat, more vicious than if she’d bared her teeth at Calla.

“Ronan?” Gansey’s voice is concerned, cautious, anxious. 

“I’m waiting in the car,” Ronan says, and she turns on her heel to go, slamming the front door behind her.

She has to stop for a moment on the porch to grab the railing and crouch, trying to stop herself from hyperventilating. Squeezing her eyes shut she tries to time her breaths and simultaneously choke back sobs. Her head is going light. This is no good, she tells herself. It’s been awhile since she lost control of herself like this over her mother, but the combination of hearing her invoked by a stranger and the shock of learning that this stranger could be aware of the existence of her secret, even if she couldn’t guess the secret itself, has pushed her into a high panic. She doesn’t want to fucking faint on the porch of a house full of psychics. 

It takes a while to restore her breathing to normal, and when she does she stands shakily and makes her way back to the Camaro. She gets into the passenger seat and twists around to lift Chainsaw in his bundled tshirt from the back. Settling him in her lap, she runs a finger over his tiny, fragile head. He is warm and soft and looks up at her in the way babies look up at their mothers and Ronan cries until she’s tired of crying. Then she rests her head back and waits for the others to come out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Lena & Angie for proofing!
> 
> Tumblr for this project: lady-trc  
> My fandom tumblr: psychotic-adam-parrish


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The loss of her mother has changed her in so many ways that sometimes she loses track of just how different she is these days, but she’s always known that it had damaged, perhaps beyond repair, her ability to communicate. This feels a little like telling Gansey how she’s doing, even if she can’t say it. Her nighttime self is raw and while rawness often translates into entirely pure states of rage or grief, tonight she is soft. This raven, like her sister, like most animals, makes her soft, and for that she is grateful. And she is grateful that Gansey is seeing it.

It’s a long time before Gansey and Eve leave the house at 300 Fox Way. Ronan watches as they stand for a while talking on the porch. There’s something they want to say to each other without Ronan hearing, and Ronan wonders if it’s how to deal with the bomb sitting in the car. Finally they make their way to the curb and join Ronan in the Camaro.

“So, did they tell you your future?” Ronan asks, hoping that it is clear by the tone of her voice that she won’t tolerate any discussion of what Calla had said to her.

“I drew the Death card,” Gansey says as she pulls out of her parking spot. “Seems about right. Well actually, I got the Page of something --”

“Cups,” Eve fills in.

“That’s right, Page of Cups, and I got it twice, but Maura kept saying it was Blue’s card. Which makes me wonder -- but I don’t know. Anyway, afterward we asked about the ley line and Maura said she didn’t know anything but I pressed her about it and she admitted that she did know. But she won’t help us.” 

“We know that psychics in general know about the ley lines. We were right to go to them, it is tied to what they do,” Eve says. “But these particular psychics don’t feel like sharing.”

“I mean the whole thing was strange, wasn’t it? Turning up the same card like that twice, them saying we were -- loud. And Calla --” Gansey breaks off, glances at Ronan, and does not return to that train of thought. “It was strange. My first thought when they wouldn’t say anything about the ley lines was that they’re not eager to share the tricks of the trade. Psychics aren’t famous for telling people how they do what they do. It’s a little like stage magic, right? If you tell everyone how to do it, no one will come see the show. Everyone wants to believe that it just -- happens. Even if real magic exists, no one likes to think of it being work, or something that has to be studied. They want it to be effortless. So I thought that’s why they wouldn’t say. But now I’m thinking, what if it’s related to how strange everything else was?”

“How could it be?” Eve asks. She sounds a little irritated, and that’s rare for Eve when she and Gansey aren’t having a serious fight. Ronan wonders if she’s still thinking about Blue.

“I mean that it feels like Blue is important to all of this, and that means his mother doesn’t want to help us. She doesn’t want to trust us with her son”

“Can you blame her?” It’s the first time Ronan’s spoken in a while, so Gansey and Eve both look at her, each a little wary.

“I guess not,” Gansey says softly. 

They drive much of the way back to Monmouth in silence, but it’s clear that Gansey is still thinking about the reading, and about Blue. If they both end up with a crush on this boy -- Ronan doesn’t want to think about it. She wonders what it would be like to have a crush that could feasibly end in a relationship. 

Ronan doesn’t take part in much of the fevered discussion of the reading and the occupants of 300 Fox Way that picks up again between Eve and Gansey when they return to Monmouth. Some of it she listens to, some of it she tunes out while bouncing a rubber ball against the door of the kitchen/bathroom/laundry room. Every couple hours, she retreats to her room to feed Chainsaw. She has a ziploc bag of ground up worms that seem to be working for now, but she’s a little anxious about what she’s going to do as the raven gets older. She doesn’t want to make him too dependent on her for food since he’s going to have to hunt for himself eventually, but she doesn’t want to starve him either. But she can cross that bridge when she comes to it -- for now, he has to be fed every two hours. Given how little interest she has in following Gansey and Eve’s conversation, she tries to get a little sleep between feedings, nodding off in the big armchair in the corner while the other two sit talking on Gansey’s bed. She’s asleep when they leave, so she wakes up at one point to a totally still and silent apartment. Leah is probably in her room, but she’d made it clear that she didn’t want to go to the psychic's’ house and it’s unsurprising that she didn’t come out for the conversation of the day’s events. Ronan thinks for a moment of knocking on her door, but in the end she just goes into her own room and shuts the door behind her.

*

Ronan wakes to her 2:20 AM alarm reminding her to feed Chainsaw and thinks for the third time that day that she has never given parents as a class the recognition they deserve for taking care of babies in the middle of the night. It’s not like Ronan is accustomed to having much sleep -- her insomnia, while more sporadic than Gansey’s, means that exhaustion is part of her daily life, but it’s wearing to keep waking up on a night when she’s actually able to fall asleep. Still, she thinks, as she retrieves the bag of Chainsaw’s food from under her bed, at least this keeps her from nightmares. 

She turns up the Celtic music that had been playing while she was asleep and lifts Chainsaw’s tshirt nest onto her bed. The lids of his beady eyes blink groggily open at the movement and as she lifts some of the ground worms with the tweezers, he makes a shrieking sound that Ronan can hear even above the blaring sound of music from her headphones. He’s getting vocal. 

The slow process of feeding him is almost over when a hand pulls Ronan’s headphones down around her neck. She turns to see a sleepy Gansey, looking simultaneously irritated and ready to make peace. “I thought we were clear on what a closed door meant,” Ronan says. It’s common enough for Gansey to see her in a sports bra and boxers -- her feeling of violated privacy has more to do with her room. She’s never been able to understand how Gansey can live in the main part of the apartment, her bed, her desk, all of her things out in the open. 

“I thought we were clear that night was for sleeping,” Gansey says, the annoyance in her voice winning out over her initial placating tone by the end of the sentence.

“Perhaps for you,” Ronan says, turning back to Chainsaw. 

“Not tonight, your pterodactyl woke me.” She steps forward a little to watch as Ronan feeds the bird again. “Why is it making that sound?” The question is apparently a rhetorical one because she crosses her arms over her chest and continues. “Well this is not going to do. You’re going to have to make it stop.”

Ronan rolls her eyes. Sometimes she thinks Gansey has had too easy a time of convincing others to give her what she wants. It’s not as though Gansey’s life is excessively comfortable -- anyone who thinks it’s comfortable to be a trans girl in Virginia clearly has no idea what they’re talking about -- but when she decides to ask for something, she’s accustomed to getting it. It seems plausible to Ronan that she really believes that if she told this baby raven to be quiet, he would obey her.

“He has to be fed,” Ronan says, deciding to entirely avoid the question of whether it’s possible to discipline and train a day old bird. “It’s only every two hours for the first six weeks.”

“Can’t you keep him downstairs?” Gansey asks, and now there’s a hint of a whine in her voice, which is never a good sign. 

Aware that fighting will not be an effective tactic right now, she lifts Chainsaw up to Gansey so that she can see him more clearly, hoping that his cuteness will be more convincing than she could be. “You tell me.”

“I don’t like that thing in here,” Leah’s voice comes from the doorway. “It reminds me of…” She doesn’t finish, and Ronan turns to see her chewing on the sleeve of her sweatshirt.

“Hey man, stay out of my room,” Ronan says, pointing the tweezers at her. Gansey is, on occasion, allowed inside but, as usual, she is the sole exception to this rule.

“Shut up,” Gansey says. “That includes you, bird.” 

“Chainsaw,” Ronan says as she turns her attention back to her task. She hears Leah’s soft footsteps retreating, but Gansey remains, leaning against Ronan’s dresser to watch. Ronan leaves her headphones around her neck. She can still hear the music this way and it somehow makes the process of feeding Chainsaw feel more intimate. It feels good, too, to have Gansey watching her. The loss of her mother has changed her in so many ways that sometimes she loses track of just how different she is these days, but she’s always known that it had damaged, perhaps beyond repair, her ability to communicate. This feels a little like telling Gansey how she’s doing, even if she can’t say it. Her nighttime self is raw and while rawness often translates into entirely pure states of rage or grief, tonight she is soft. This raven, like her sister, like most animals, makes her soft, and for that she is grateful. And she is grateful that Gansey is seeing it. 

“What did the psychic mean, Ronan? Earlier, about your mother?”

Ronan tenses, wondering how to deflect Gansey’s curiosity. She had thought that perhaps the question could just be swept under the rug, ignored by her friends so that they could all avoid mentioning Nora. “That’s a very Declan question.”

“No, no I don’t think it is.”

“She was just full of shit.”

“No, I don’t think she was.”

Ronan pauses her music and tries to clear her voice of fear as she speaks, staring at the wall and keeping her hands steady and still around Chainsaw. “She’s one of those chicks who gets inside your head and fucks around with parts. She said it because she knew it would cause problems.”

“Like what?”

Ronan glares at Gansey. “Like you asking me questions like Declan would.” She lifts another bit of feed to Chainsaw, but this time he doesn’t open his beak, only stares up at her with what Ronan thinks has to be the bird equivalent of love. She lowers the tweezers. “Making me think about things I don’t wanna think about. Those sorts of problems. Among others.” She can tell that this isn’t going to get Gansey to leave her alone. She’s going to need a distraction. Possibly something that’s a bit of a low blow. She glances at Gansey. “What’s up with your hair, man?”

Gansey hand goes to her hair, touching it the way a grandmother or a black and white TV housewife would. “Are the roots showing?”

“And your perm is starting to look funny.”

“I’ll have to go to the hairdresser this weekend,” she says, now fretfully pulling at the tips.

“My way is much more low maintenance, you know,” Ronan says, closing her ziploc and stowing it back under the bed. “I could always shave your head for you, I have my clippers in the bathroom.”  
Gansey’s look of alarm is so sincere that Ronan can’t help smiling a little. “Don’t you dare.”

“Relax, it’s not like I’m gonna come cut your hair off in the middle of the night. As much fun as that would be.”

“Don’t you dare!”

“I can’t believe you have a perm. It’s the twenty first century, Gansey.”

“I think it looks nice.”

“You look like you’re from the fifties.”

“I think I look classy. Anyway, I’m going back to bed. You’d better keep that thing quiet. You so owe me, Lynch.”

“Whatever.” 

Gansey goes out and closes the door behind her, leaving Ronan alone. Her body still feels jittery from being questioned. She leans over to switch off the lamp, sets Chainsaw back down next to her bed, but even as she lies back down and closes her eyes, she’s certain she won’t be able to sleep, especially knowing she’ll just be up again in a few hours. It’s just going to be one of those nights.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Lena & Angie for proofing!
> 
> Tumblr for this project: lady-trc  
> My fandom tumblr: psychotic-adam-parrish


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gansey, it seems to her, has always taken things for granted: her money, her friends, her life. Even when she should know better. Ronan picks the wasp up from the ground. By the light coming in from the window she can see the delicate, networking lines across its wings, the destroyed body, the stinger Gansey might carelessly step on if she doesn’t get rid of it.

Ronan can’t stop thinking about Gansey’s question. It’s not like she’s never had the urge to tell her friends about her dreams before, but her mother’s prohibition had been absolute, and even without it Ronan knows how dangerous her secret is. After all, it killed her mother. She’s not going to tell Gansey. Sometimes it feels like she doesn’t know herself at all, but she knows this: she doesn’t lie and she keeps her promises. Still, there are nights when keeping this promise feels an awful lot like lying. Restless, she rolls out of bed and goes into the main room to see if Gansey’s still awake.

Gansey is standing by the window with a shoe in her hand, and it takes a moment for the picture to make sense to Ronan. Then she she sees a small speck on the window in front of Gansey, and she understands.

“Shit, man!” In a few quick strides she’s next to Gansey and snatching the shoe from her hand to smash it as hard as she can against the glass. The wasp that had landed there falls to the ground at her feet and she bends down to hit it again. Just to be safe, or else to give relief to the still wild beating of her heart. “Shit, are you stupid?” Now that the fear is over, she’s pissed. Gansey, it seems to her, has always taken things for granted: her money, her friends, her life. Even when she should know better. Ronan picks the wasp up from the ground. By the light coming in from the window she can see the delicate, networking lines across its wings, the destroyed body, the stinger Gansey might carelessly step on if she doesn’t get rid of it. She flicks it into the overflowing trash can but it ricochets off a crumpled piece of paper so she has to go look for the body again in the dark corner. 

“What’d you want?” Gansey’s voice sounds strange and distant when she speaks. Momentarily distracted, Ronan looks up.

“What?”

“You came out for something.” 

Ronan keeps looking for the wasp’s body. “I can’t even remember.” She does remember, but the faint temptation to tell Gansey about her dreams and her mother has vanished entirely. She finds the wasp and crams it safely into the trash. She thinks about heading back to her room, but then she remembers something Leah told her that’s been tugging at the back of her mind and knows that she’ll only be able to ask about it under the cover of darkness. “What’s this about you and Parrish leaving?”

“You tell me what you heard, and I’ll tell you what’s real.” There’s something cautious about Gansey’s voice that Ronan doesn’t like, like she’s speaking to a child who might throw a tantrum if she isn’t sufficiently placating. She tries harder than she might have otherwise not to sound pissed or jealous when she replies.

“Leah told me that if you left Parrish was going with you.”

“And what else did Leah have to say?” 

Apparently, Ronan hadn’t done a good enough job because Gansey sounds annoyed. Last year, when they’d read Anna Karenina (or more accurately, when Gansey had read Anna Karenina and given Ronan a good enough summary to get her through their midterm), Gansey had said that Ronan was like Anna. “Jealousy is your demon,” she’d said, and said with a smile, but it had still stung and Ronan still remembers. With great effort, she makes her voice as neutral as possible. “Do you not want me to come?”

“I would take all of you anywhere with me.” 

Relief floods her, as well as shame. She doesn’t know why she keeps doubting Gansey’s friendship, but at the same time she isn’t sure why she should have faith in it either. These days Gansey doesn’t treat her like she used to. Ronan’s a loose canon, and until something major changes, Gansey’s always going to act like she could go off at any moment. A thing to be kept but not trusted. Still, she thinks -- a thing to be kept. It’s a great deal better than nothing. She thinks again of her secret and her promise, and begins to speak. “The other night, there’s something.” She can’t finish the sentence.

“There’s what?” A pause, and then again, like a mother out of patience: “There’s what, Ronan?”

The sentence comes out garbled and illogical, a string of things that are only connected in Ronan’s head. She doesn’t know how to make it anything else. “This thing with Chainsaw, and the psychic woman, and just. With Leah. And I just think there’s something strange going on.”

“Strange doesn’t help me. I don’t know what strange means.”

Ronan wishes desperately that Gansey would stop sounding so exasperated and grown up. It makes Ronan feel like a little kid, like elementary school when teachers kept asking her for answers to questions she didn’t understand, before she’d perfected the glare that makes even adults, even teachers, leave her alone for the most part. “I don’t know man. This sounds crazy to me. I don’t know what to tell you,” She breathes deep and tries to figure out how to put the feeling of unrest she’s had all day into words. “I mean strange like your voice on that recorder. Strange like the psychic’s son. Things feel bigger. I don’t know what I’m saying. I thought you would believe me of all people.”

“I don’t even know what you’re asking me to believe.” There’s an edge of sympathy in Gansey’s voice now, and it’s not much but it makes Ronan feel a bit better.

“It’s starting, man.” She looks at Gansey finally to gauge whether she understands what Ronan’s trying to say. It’s starting like the search for Glyndower is finally more than a collection of clues that don’t fit together into anything meaningful. It’s starting like her secret is beginning to feel like it might actually get her killed. It’s starting like none of them can bear their day to day lives anymore and if magic and a dead queen and the voice in Gansey’s ear that had told her that she would live when she should not don’t start changing things pretty soon then they’ll find another way to distract themselves. To change things. To get themselves killed. Sometimes that’s all Gansey’s quest feels like. Sometimes when she looks at her best friend, all she sees is a girl waiting for a convenient moment to die and she knows it shouldn’t piss her off and it does. She kicks the trash can, but not hard enough to knock it over. “I catch you staring at a wasp again though, I’m gonna let it kill you. Screw that.”

She goes back to her room without saying goodnight. Ronan loves Gansey and she always will, but that doesn’t change the fact that there are days when their conversations make Ronan want to slam her head against the wall. 

All her life she’s been bad at words. It gets her in trouble at school, complicates her relationship with her brother, and makes friendship difficult. Her mother had been like her. Nora Lynch had adjusted better than her daughter to living in a world where words are necessary, but their natures had been the same: physical and silent. Ronan remembers nights when her mother knew she wasn’t doing well and would take her out to the back porch to share a beer and watch the cows in the dim evening light. It’s the most cathartic thing Ronan’s ever experienced, and the fact that it’ll never happen again feels like suffocation. Lying in bed, she closes her eyes and remembers those nights, the stillness of the country, the sound of insects and animals, the irretrievable smell of her mother beside her. 

Once, she’d watched an episode of Gilmore Girls with her sister Mary and she’d scoffed at it. “No family is actually like that." 

Mary had just laughed at her. “Just because your idea of mother-daughter bonding time is sitting in silence and staring at cows doesn’t mean that there aren’t families where mothers and daughters paint each other’s toenails like normal people.” 

After that Ronan had always wondered if Mary would prefer a Gilmore Girls family, but then again Mary has never been one to wish for things she can’t have. Unlike her siblings, she’s always found a way to be happy with what she gets, even when what she’s gotten is a dead mother, a father who neither speaks nor moves, and a brother and sister who can’t talk to each other without fighting. Ronan should take her out for lunch sometime soon. 

She checks her watch. Almost an hour has passed since the last time she fed Chainsaw. Only an hour until she has to be up again. It might not be worth trying to fall asleep again at all. But even as she thinks it, she feels the steady tug of sleep. It’s never something she’s been good at resisting. During her spells of insomnia, that tug disappears entirely, but as soon as it returns, she’s useless against it. Her mind becomes a loose constellation of ideas, thoughts of Mary and Eve and Gansey and Chainsaw shifting and getting mixed up in one another. She wishes for a dream of the Barns and her mother, the silent cows and behind them the sounds of Mary and her father cleaning up after dinner, the scent of dish soap and Mary’s soft laugh. She wishes it even though she’s never been able to pick what she’ll dream about, even though she’s never dreamt of the Barns since her exile, even though she knows how it would hurt to wake up if she could go home in her sleep. 

The wanting of it presses at her chest until she finally loses consciousness. Instead of the Barns, she dreams of Monmouth, empty of people and furniture, a bird’s nest in the rafters above where Gansey’s bed usually is. She’s grateful after all when her alarm goes off, pulling her back into the real Monmouth. Shutting her alarm off, she goes out into the main room before she feeds Chainsaw. Gansey’s bed is still there, with Gansey asleep in it. The armchair and Gansey’s desk and her miniature Henrietta are all still there, the bookshelves and knick knacks, the map of Virginia plastered over the wall. It’s silly, she knows, this need to make sure that her nightmare hasn’t somehow transformed the real world, but the possibility is so much greater for her than for anyone else that she can’t resist the urge. Silently closing the door, she lifts Chainsaw onto the bed to feed him, hoping his cries won’t wake Gansey again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Lena & Angie for proofing!
> 
> Tumblr for this project: lady-trc  
> My fandom tumblr: psychotic-adam-parrish


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Leah, who is unexpectedly handy with a toolkit, is sitting cross legged on the dusty ground surrounded by plywood and bouncing a hammer off the edge of her shoe while Ronan lies under the BMW with a tape measure. It smells like gas and the coming of summer and she feels better than she has all week.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for homophobic slurs

It’s actually Leah that suggests making a ramp to see how far they can make the BMW fly. Gansey of course assumes that it’s Ronan -- if it sounds stupid and dangerous, she always assumes Ronan thought of it -- because like everyone else, she tends to forget that Leah is in some way involved in almost everything stupid and dangerous that Ronan does, unless she gets scared. Like Gansey, Leah had gotten exhausted by the symptoms of Ronan’s irritability, at record high levels due to a potent combination of sleep deprivation, restlessness, and anxiety over the reading at 300 Fox Way and manifesting mostly in violence toward the furnishings of the apartment. Ronan can sense their annoyance and she isn’t totally sure whether she’s unable or simply unwilling to exist a little more peacefully, but either way, nothing changes until Leah lures her outside almost a week later with the promise of doing something really spectacular with the car. Gansey is supposedly going to show up later with a helicopter, but she can usually be counted on to be late, and Ronan needs a way to kill some time.

Leah, who is unexpectedly handy with a toolkit, is sitting cross legged on the dusty ground surrounded by plywood and bouncing a hammer off the edge of her shoe while Ronan lies under the BMW with a tape measure. It smells like gas and the coming of summer and she feels better than she has all week. Turning her head at the sound of a bicycle coming up the drive, she sees Eve’s familiar feet hit the ground and give a few futile jabs at the kickstand before she simply drops the bike in the grass and walks over to them. 

“When do you think Gansey will get here?”

Ronan takes her time finishing her measurement. “Ten inches, Leah.”

“”Is that all? That doesn’t seem like very much.”

“Would I lie to you? Ten. Inches.”

She scoots out from under the car to look up at Eve. The sun is behind her head and it’s making a halo out of her hair, which Ronan quite frankly thinks is completely unfair. “Who knows. When did she say?”

“Three.” 

Ronan gets up and dusts herself off. Eve is staring at Leah and Ronan turns to see her scratching at the back of her skull with a screwdriver. For someone as good with tools as she is, Leah spends a lot of her time almost seriously injuring herself with them, mostly out of boredom. 

“What is your plan with these things anyway?” Eve asks, looking apprehensive.

“Ramp. BMW. The goddamn moon,” Ronan says. Leah had suggested trying to jump over the grass that separates the parking lot in front of Monmouth from the main road, but Ronan prefers the moon as a destination. 

“The trajectory you’re building doesn’t suggest the moon. It suggests the end of your suspension.”

“I don’t need your back-talk, nerd.” There’s something off about Eve, now that Ronan takes a closer look at her. She doesn’t sound like herself. Her usual slow, deliberate tone is even more careful and measured than usual. “What’s your malfunction, anyway?” 

“I’m trying to decide when I should call Blue.” 

Ronan’s mood sours instantly. The sunny day, spending time with the car, Leah’s enthusiasm for the project had all combined to make her something close to happy, but it’s a fleeting feeling faced with the prospect of Eve calling a boy.

“She sent him flowers.”

This lifts Ronan’s spirits. She turns to Eve, grinning. “To the psychic’s? You sent a boy flowers? Flowers. To a boy.” She runs a hand over her shaved head, still grinning. “I fucking love you, Parrish.”

Eve shrugs. “It’s the 21st century, a girl can send a boy flowers.”

“Never said you couldn’t. I didn’t think you’d be into that kind of fucking weirdo hippie granola kid.”

“How do you mean?”

“He sewed feathers to his shirt. Who does that, man?”

Eve heaves a sigh that sounds more irritated than Ronan thinks she’s really earned, and checks her watch. “Give me your phone.”

Ronan retrieves it from where she’d left it on the hood of the BMW with the vague hope that the heat would damage it enough to prevent Declan from ever calling her again. After the death of her mother, Aglionby had started sending notifications of disciplinary and attendance problems to Declan, which means she never gets a moment’s peace from him. Especially on a week like this when she’s only been at school two out of five days and had punched Skov on one of those days. She tosses the phone to Eve, who dials a number. She has his fucking number memorized, Ronan thinks, sucking her teeth. 

“Blue?” There’s a sort of shy excitement in her voice that creates an ache in Ronan that she doesn’t want to think about. “Oh, um. Yeah.” Her face turns anxious for a moment, then she smiles. Given what they’d seen at Fox Way, Ronan guesses that one of the many women of the house answered the phone. “It seems busy there.” Another pause. “Exploring. Do you want to come with?”

Ronan’s eyes go wide. She hadn’t expected this, not only because she hadn’t expected Eve to have the guts to ask a boy out on what looks unnervingly like a date, but also because she had never expected Eve to ask any boy on one of their trips. She suddenly realizes how intensely she wants Blue not to be there. It isn’t, or isn’t just, a matter of her sexuality. It isn’t that she now has, infuriatingly, both the remnants of a crush on Gansey and the beginnings of one on Eve. It isn’t jealousy that they can like boys like everyone else. It’s that, truth be told, she’s deeply uncomfortable with the idea of a new member, and especially a boy, in their group. She’s carefully cultivated friendships with the few girls at Aglionby who she actually likes, which is a near complete overlap with the population of Aglionby who has never called her a man-hating dyke. There’s an assumption, she has found, that as a generally butch of center lesbian, she should want to be a bro, but for her, one of the real perks of lesbianism is not having to have anything to do with boys. She likes Gansey and she likes Eve and she likes Leah, and she likes their ambiguity when it comes to questions of sexual and romantic tastes. They exist in that liminal space that is not exactly platonic but not exactly anything else either. It makes Ronan crazy but it also keeps her alive. The idea of a boy, and a boy that Eve likes, being allowed into the group that Ronan has taken such care with is infuriating. 

She’s lost track of the conversation, but snaps back into focus in time to catch her phone when Eve tosses it back to her. Her instincts letting her down, she thinks. She wishes she’d let it crash to the ground and break. 

“I’m going to pick him up.”

“He’s coming with us?” Ronan asks, still somehow hoping to avoid this.

“Yep.” Her smile makes Ronan want to fight someone, but she’s not sure who. “I’ll be back. Good luck with your trip to the moon.”

She waves goodbye to Leah and heads back down the sidewalk, leaving her bike in the grass.

Ronan kicks the back tire of the BMW. 

“Don’t be pissed,” Leah says, watching her apprehensively.

“So you’re alright with this? With Eve bringing a boy along on a trip, like, what, like a date?”

Leah shrugs. “I dunno, he seems nice.”

“You haven’t even met him.”

Leah only shrugs again in reply. Then her expression brightens and she points down the road in the direction opposite from the one Eve is walking in. “Gansey’s back!”

The Camaro pulls into the parking lot and Gansey gets out, looking disgustingly chipper.

“Helen’s on her way with the helicopter, we won’t be too far behind schedule.”

“What took you so long,” Ronan asks.

“Oh, you know,” Gansey says. Her good mood is making her especially unhelpful. “Helen.” She looks around the parking lot. “Where’s Eve?”

Ronan folds her arms tightly across her chest. “Picking up a boy.”

Gansey pauses, her hand on the door of the Camaro. “Oh?”

“Blue, from the psychic’s house. The boy with the feathers.”

Gansey’s expression brightens, and this strengthens Ronan’s need to fight someone. “Oh, well that’s alright. There’ll be room for him in the helicopter. Maybe he can help with the ley lines. He knew his mother was lying, which means he must know something too. He might not be psychic, but he can’t have grown up in that house and not have learned anything about energy work along the way. He could be helpful.”

“Helpful.”

Gansey closes the door of the Camaro and raises her eyebrow at Ronan. “What’s that tone for?”

Ronan grits her teeth and resists the urge to scold Gansey for her tone as well. “I think he’ll be more distracting than helpful.”

“Oh?”

“Eve likes him.”

Gansey, apparently deciding that Ronan’s annoyance is not a real threat to the project of the day, smiles again. “Well, I don’t think he’ll be distracting to you.”

“You’re hilarious, Gansey.”

“Come on, it won’t be so bad. He’s just a boy, not the monster under your bed. Leah, can you clear away all that crap, we need plenty of room for the helicopter to land.”

Leah begins to gather the wood and tools scattered around the BMW and Gansey turns back to Ronan, her expression serious. “I want you to be nice to him, Ronan. First impressions count. We want him to be helpful and he won’t be helpful if we’re rude to him.”

“If I’m rude to him.”

“Yes.”

Ronan breathes deeply, releasing the air slowly through clenched teeth. She tries to decide how much to put into words. Then she tries to figure out how to put it into words. “I just don’t like it. A boy in the group. I like it the way things are.”

Gansey doesn’t look at her when she speaks, and Ronan gets the sense that it’s because she doesn’t really want to gauge how upset Ronan is by this. “Well, you didn’t like it at first when Eve joined, did you? You were a hostile asshole to her for months, but now you’ve taken to her just fine.”

“Yeah, I like Eve. And yeah, I didn’t like her at first but this is different. This is a boy.”

“You’re making assumptions.”

“Gansey.”

“But it’s the same thing, right?” Gansey finally looks at her, and her frustration, her disappointment, is evident. Ronan clenches her hands around her arms. “It’s you being jealous. It’s you worrying that your friends won’t like you anymore once they find a newer shinier toy. Christ, Ronan, you’re not the only person in the world who knows how to be loyal. Eve isn’t going to ditch you because she’s found a new friend, even if it is a boy. Even if they start dating. And you should know by now that new people in the group are never going to threaten what you mean to me.”

Ronan doesn’t know what to make of this. To hear this from Gansey would usually be reassuring, comforting, lovely -- but it’s delivered like she’s out of patience with Ronan and her insecurities. What you mean to me, said like she’s sick of having to hold Ronan’s hand through every change to their group. She sticks her hands into the pockets of her jeans. “Yeah. Fine.”

The sound of a helicopter above them cuts off any further conversation they might have had and Gansey looks up, shielding her eyes to see it come toward them, the smile back on her face. “Just waiting on Eve, then,” she shouts above the sound.

Ronan can’t quite blame her for the ease with which she’s forgotten their conversation. After all, the quest is everything to Gansey, and to her a day in the air is a perfect day. She only wishes she wasn’t the only one left stinging.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Lena & Angie for proofing!
> 
> Tumblr for this project: lady-trc  
> My fandom tumblr: psychotic-adam-parrish


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She likes the view from here, watching the cars like insects crawling down the roads below. When she turns, she sees Eve leaning over disconcertingly close to Blue, speaking in his ear. She looks away again, wishing she hadn’t seen anything. Still, she can feel Eve’s hand gripping the bench between them, shaking slightly.

Because Helen can generally be relied upon not to be unnecessarily sociable, Ronan gets into the helicopter as soon as it lands, leaving Gansey to bounce around the parking lot excitedly while waiting for Eve to return with Blue. She can hear vaguely a shouted conversation among them, including, she thinks, the phrase “get your skates on,” and Ronan has to resist the urge to get out of the helicopter to tell Gansey that no one in America ever says that. As they’re climbing in, Blue asks, “Is this thing safe?”

“Safe as life,” Gansey says, settling into her seat next to Helen. Eve knocks her shoulder against Ronan’s by way of greeting. 

In the front, Helen turns to Gansey. “Aren’t you going to introduce us, Robin?” Gansey tenses noticeably. It’s her birth name and though it’s technically gender neutral and easy to pass off as feminine (which is the only reason she had agreed when her parents insisted she keep it as her legal name), she still hates it. Her family are the only ones who use it, and it’s part of why Gansey doesn’t like going home. It had been Ronan who came up with the idea of her going by Gansey. They’d spent ages going through baby books together, laughing at names that didn’t even come close to fitting her, and then Ronan had said, “You could just use your last name. That’s what people will call you at Aglionby anyway, if you end up coming.” Gansey had been laying on the carpet, looking up at the ceiling and eating sour gummies. “Gansey,” she’d said, stretching the word out. “Just Gansey. I like it.” It had stuck, and now no one ever calls her anything else. 

Now she turns and looks over her shoulder. “Blue, this is my sister Helen.”

“Nice to meet you, Blue,” Helen says.

“Nice to meet you too, ma’am.”

There’s silence for a while and Ronan looks out the window, down at the town sprawled out below them, and thinks about the warmth of Eve’s thigh against hers.

“There she is,” Helen says. “Gansey’s girlfriend.”

Ronan snorts. Gansey’s deep and abiding love for Henrietta is a joke in her family. They can’t understand what it is about it that enchants her so completely, but Ronan can. Ronan knows what it feels like to be certain that a place is home. She had just been lucky enough to be born there. 

“She must be pretty big to see her from up here,” Blue replies, his voice slow and accented like Eve’s. It makes it easier for Ronan to see why Eve likes him. 

“Henrietta,” Helen says. “They’re getting married. They haven’t set a date yet.”

“If you’re going to embarrass me, I’ll throw you out and fly myself.”

Ronan doubts this, not only because Gansey doesn’t really seem to mind the Henrietta jokes but also because she’s seen Gansey try to fly and it never goes well.

The sisters start arguing about presents for their mother’s birthday, and Ronan tunes it out, staring out the window. She likes the view from here, watching the cars like insects crawling down the roads below. When she turns, she sees Eve leaning over disconcertingly close to Blue, speaking in his ear. She looks away again, wishing she hadn’t seen anything. Still, she can feel Eve’s hand gripping the bench between them, shaking slightly. She’s always hated flying.

Ronan jerks back into focus when Gansey shouts Eve’s name. Eve had had her headphones off, and Gansey’d been trying to get her attention. She puts her headphones back on. “Are you done talking about your mom’s plates?” 

“Very. Where should we go this time? I was thinking maybe back to the church where I recorded the voice.”

Eve leans forward and hands Gansey a piece of paper. 

“What’s this,” Gansey asks, peering at it.

“Blue,” Eve replies simply. Gansey looks sharply at Blue, and Ronan finds a little relief in this. Eve’s trust of the boy seems settled and absolute, but at least Gansey is still hesitant about him. 

Eventually she hands the map to Helen and tells her to follow it. They fly for a while in silence before Blue makes a sound and points down at the ground ahead of them.

“That’s it?” Gansey asks.

“That’s all there is left.” 

Gansey turns to the backseat, her entire expression changed. She looks almost frightened, and it puts Ronan immediately on edge. “What did you say?”

“It’s a ruin, but --”

“No,” Gansey says, her tone somehow simultaneously sharp and small. “Say precisely what you said before.” And then, a little pleadingly, “Please.”

“I don’t remember what I said.” He looks confused and a little alarmed at Gansey’s insistence. “Was it...That’s all there is?”

“I’m not made of of fuel,” Helen says, breaking the strangeness of the moment. “Tell me where to go from here.” 

“What’s the lay of the line, Blue?” Eve asks. She doesn’t seem to have made whatever connection it is that Gansey had, but Ronan is still thinking about it. Blue and Helen are talking about what direction to take the helicopter, but Ronan is thinking. Yes, she thinks, there’s something familiar about those words. That’s all there is. Why would they be so poignant to Gansey? And then she remembers: the voice on the recorder. 

Gansey.

Is that all?

That’s all there is.

Of course Gansey would think of it right away. Countless times Ronan had found her listening to the recording again and again, characteristically obsessive. She herself had listened to it maybe a dozen times on the day they’d gone to pick Gansey up from the side of the road. She knows the voice, the cadence of the words. And Gansey knows them absolutely by heart. Sometimes from the bathroom she can hear just the clicking of the buttons as Gansey rewinds the tape to listen to those few seconds time after time. “Blue,” she says, and everyone turns. One of the advantages of not speaking often is that everyone pays attention when you do. “Do you know Gansey?”

Blue sucks in his cheeks and then releases them and says, “Only her name.”

Blue, or whatever he might know or whatever power it is that had put his voice on the recorder now feels like a threat to Gansey, and Ronan reacts to it in the same way she reacts to anything and everything that might threaten Gansey. That is, she reciprocates the threat. She leans forward over Eve and Blue shrinks back against the side of the helicopter. “And how is it you came to know Gansey’s name?”

Ronan is somewhat disappointed by the steadiness of Blue’s voice when he replies. “First of all, get out of my face.”

“What if I don’t?” 

“Ronan,” Gansey’s voice comes over the headphones and Ronan retreats automatically. She’s been well trained, she thinks, with only a little bitterness.

Gansey speaks again. “I would like to know, though.” 

“I guess that’s fair. But that,” he says, gesturing at Ronan, “is not the way to get me to answer anything. Next time she gets in my face, I let you find this thing on your own. I’ll -- look. I’ll tell you how I knew your name if you explain to me what the shape is that you have in your journal.”

“Tell me why we’re negotiating with terrorists,” Ronan asks. It seems absurd to her that they’d give more information to someone they barely know who has some kind of connection to Gansey’s spirit. Gansey’s necessarily dead spirit. 

“Since when am I a terrorist?” He seems genuinely pissed off, which makes Ronan like him a little better. “Seems to me I came bringing something you guys wanted and you’re being dicks.”

“Not all of us,” Eve says, defensive.

“I am not being a dick,” Gansey says, which makes Ronan smile because that leaves only her, and she knows she’s being a dick and she’s profoundly undisturbed by what Blue thinks of her. But of course Gansey hates the idea of being disliked by anyone. “Now, what is this thing you want to know?”

“Hold on, I’ll show you what I mean,” he says, reaching his hand out for Gansey’s journal, and Ronan can see what it costs Gansey to hand it over. When he points out the page, Gansey squints at it.

“I believe that is a man chasing a car.”

Blue rolls his eyes. “Not that. This.”

“They’re ley lines,” Gansey says, in familiar territory now, and clearly more comfortable once she has taken the journal back. What Blue has pointed out is simply a doodle of the three intersecting lines, but Gansey turns to a different page and traces over the ley lines as she has drawn them over a map of the U.S. “These are the three main lines. The ones that seem to matter.” She explains to Blue what little they know about the ley lines -- the appearance of strange and supernatural creatures around them, the spikes in energy readings. 

“My mother drew that shape,” he says. “The ley lines. So did Nee -- one of the other women here. They didn’t know what it was, though, only that it would be significant. That’s why I wanted to know.”

“Now you,” Ronan says. This whole time her heart has been beating rapidly against her ribs. Her hands are cold with nerves. The idea of Gansey in danger is intensely unsettling to her.

“I -- saw Gansey’s spirit. I’ve never seen one before. I don’t see things like that, but this time, I did.” He turns to Gansey. “I asked you your name, and you told me. ‘Gansey. That’s all there is.’ Honestly it’s part of the reason why I wanted to come along today.”

“Saw her where?” Ronan asks. There seem to be parts missing from Blue’s explanation. It’s possible that Blue is as much or nearly as much in the dark as they are, but Ronan doesn’t trust that possibility. 

“While I was sitting outside with one of my half aunts.”

Ronan leans back in her seat. If he has more information, he clearly isn’t going to give it up willingly. “What’s the other half of her?”

“God, Ronan,” Eve snaps. “Enough.” 

Ronan chews on her leather bands. She’s doing a good job of getting everyone annoyed with her today. It feels like she’s been doing that for a while now.

“I’m going to need everyone to be straight with each other from now on. No more games. This isn’t just for Blue, either. All of us.”

“I’m always straight,” Ronan replies, partially as a joke, partially because it’s true in the sense that Gansey had meant it. She doesn’t lie.

“Oh man,” Eve says, grinning at her. “That’s the biggest lie you’ve ever told.”

Blue, not in on the joke, simply says, “Okay.”

It feels good to have some of the tension from earlier released and it feels good to have Eve smiling at her, even if it’s just because she’d made a dumb joke. She feels again like she belongs here, not like a bully. True, she still doesn’t think she can trust Blue, but he doesn’t seem actively malevolent. Chances are, Ronan thinks, that if he’s going to hurt Gansey, it won’t be intentional. She just wishes that made her feel like her friend was safe. Looking out at the ground below them, she wonders if Blue really will be able to help them. Certainly he seems to know more about the ley lines than they do. He’d been able to direct Helen along it easily, and they had only ever had the vaguest idea of where the line is. It’s like she’d told Gansey the other night. It’s starting. Until now, they’ve only been treading water, finding a clue every few months that was usually a dead end or sometimes led to another clue and then that was a dead end. Now, the pace seems to be changing and for Ronan it’s more frightening than exciting. This isn’t her quest, after all. Truth be told, she wants more to be looking for Glyndower than to find her. Things feel bigger, she’d said, when what she had meant was things feel more frightening. But she’s never been good with words.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Lena & Angie for proofing!
> 
> Tumblr for this project: lady-trc  
> My fandom tumblr: psychotic-adam-parrish


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> With the wind lifting and tumbling her hair, her chin up, she looks to Ronan like a queen. When she turns to Ronan, Ronan’s heart skips a beat because this isn’t her ordinary, everyday Gansey, this isn’t the anxious, obsessive, motherly friend she’s used to going to school with. This is a rarer Gansey, something like Gansey on fire, her grin wild and reckless like she could open her mouth and swallow this place whole. Ronan thinks she could kiss her.

As they fly, Gansey explains to Blue what they’re looking for: abnormalities in the landscape like the ones Gansey had seen on her travels to England and Peru -- carvings in the sides of mountains, formations of sand and stone so enormous that only a birds-eye view make them into a whole picture. Partway through the explanation, Eve cuts her off. 

“Gansey, what’s that, there?” 

They all crane to look in the direction Eve is pointing. “Does it make a shape?” Gansey asks, but there’s a clear change in her voice as she says “Helen, stop. Stop!” She sees it now. 

“Do you think this is a bicycle?” Helen says, annoyed, but everyone else in the helicopter is looking at the ground in wonder. 

“Look,” Eve breaths, and Ronan feels like she can hear Eve’s heartbeat in her voice. She’s reminded again of how much more this means to the rest of them than it does to Ronan. “There’s a wing, there. And there, a beak. A bird?”

It stuns Ronan that it isn’t as obvious to them as it is to her. “No,” she says. “Not just a bird. It’s a raven.” She had known what it was from the moment Eve pointed it out. It had just made sense to her and she had understood, then, a little part of Gansey’s obsession -- really understood it, bone deep in a way that is feeling and not just knowing. When she’d come back from Peru, Gansey had told her. “It hurts to see these things. I mean hurts the way thinking of Glyndower hurts.” And Ronan had tried to understand but it’s only now that she can translate it into her own vernacular. 

It hurts like a bruise the day after a fight, like homesickness, like seeing Mary after a growth spurt and knowing she’ll never again be as small and as young as she had been before. Hurts like watching Eve’s hair fall across her face. Hurts like Leah pressing a kiss to her forehead when she climbs into bed with Ronan after a nightmare. Hurts like watching Gansey when she can’t sleep. That terrible mixture of beauty and fear -- and here, she thinks, Gansey would quote Rilke to say that "beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we can just barely endure and we stand in awe of it as it coolly disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrifying," and she remembers it because Gansey had been telling her she should give poetry a chance and then had read that to her and Ronan had dreamt of those words for weeks, scribbled them again and again instead of taking notes in class, translated them into Latin out of boredom. That’s the kind of beautiful this raven is, a white shape in the lush green of the Virginia ground, neck arched back as if to cry out, its tail wings spread like a deck of cards, like Blue had fanned the tarot cards in front of her a week before. It’s lovely in a way that makes her want to cry or punch something. Lovely in a way that makes her feel gutted. 

“Put the helicopter down,” Gansey says, her tone insistent. 

“I can’t land on private property.”

“Helen, two seconds.” 

They argue, and every time Gansey says two seconds there’s more need in her voice, and it matches how Ronan feels. At last, Helen begins to lower the helicopter and Eve thanks her. 

“Two seconds. If you aren’t done by then, I’m taking off without you,” Helen says. 

Ronan and Gansey are out of the helicopter in an instant, stepping into the tall grass that waves around their legs in the breeze. Ronan turns to see Eve helping Blue down and looks away again, to Gansey. She’s pulled out her phone and is telling Leah to come join them before slipping it back into her purse and looking out over the field with her hands on her hips. With the wind lifting and tumbling her hair, her chin up, she looks to Ronan like a queen. When she turns to Ronan, Ronan’s heart skips a beat because this isn’t her ordinary, everyday Gansey, this isn’t the anxious, obsessive, motherly friend she’s used to going to school with. This is a rarer Gansey, something like Gansey on fire, her grin wild and reckless like she could open her mouth and swallow this place whole. Ronan thinks she could kiss her. 

Striding away from Ronan, she puts her hands up in the air and shouts “ARE YOU LISTENING, GLYNDOWER? I AM COMING TO FIND YOU!” Ronan laces her fingers behind her head, and she thinks her smile right now must look a little like Gansey’s. The trip would be worth it just for this, but her high mood drops a little when Eve and Blue approach. She doesn’t like the complexity of her feelings toward them, especially as a unit. 

“Oyster shells,” Gansey says, lifting a handful of them from one of the lines that makes up the raven. She and Eve and Blue start talking about why there are oyster shells here in the first place and Ronan loses interest. Besides, Eve and Blue are holding hands and she doesn’t want to think about it. She wanders toward the tree line several yards away, reaching down and running her fingers across the tops of the grass. A strange feeling begins to press at her as she approaches the forest, and she stands straighter, wary now, but keeps walking. 

There’s something about the trees that is at once alarming and familiar, and part of the fear she feels is due to the familiarity. She knows this place, but she’s certain she’s never been here before. But she knows this place. Reaching to press her hand against the bark of one of the trees, she feels a shiver go through her whole body, sudden and violent. She doesn’t move her hand. 

Breathing heavily, she peers into the woods. They seem far darker than they should on a sunny spring day. It had been like static electricity, when she touched the tree, but she feels instinctively that the power had come from her. She feels unnerved. She feels skinless. What is it about this place? There’s something familiar, too, about the way it makes her feel, and for a moment she scrambles, looking for what it is it makes her think of, and then she realizes. She feels not only like she recognizes this place, but like it recognizes her. She feels known by it. Like those times when she talks to Gansey and she says something that objectively doesn’t make sense and Gansey says yes, yes, I know exactly what you mean, like the nights when she’s too pissed or too sad or just too much to drive and Gansey makes her pull over to the side of the road and holds her hand and the silence is enough. To be known that way is at least as frightening as it is exhilarating.

Shaking herself, she turns to look for the others. They’re in a huddle, Eve and Blue standing close together and Gansey crouched over something with her EMF reader out. Ronan has long said that it’s the most ridiculous thing Gansey owns, but Gansey continues to insist on its efficacy. They’re closer to the trees than they had been before and Ronan is suddenly aware of how long she’s been standing here. She makes her way over to them and sees that Gansey is looking at a thin trickle of a stream. 

“Helen,” Eve says, looking nervously back at the helicopter.

“I said this is interesting,” Gansey says, in a tone that Ronan knows means she doesn’t care a bit how long she keeps Helen waiting as long as she gets to look at whatever has fascinated her.

“And I said Helen.”

They argue a little, with Gansey winning as expected and leading them into the trees. Under the forest canopy the air is cool and still and damp and Ronan can hear birds above them. She knows this place, but knows it, she thinks, as if from another world or another life. There are goosebumps all along her arms. 

“This is lovely,” Blue says, very softly, and Ronan can’t help but agree. She’d been so focused on the strange feeling of connection that she feels with the forest that she only now takes a moment to realize how beautiful it is -- the lush moss against the dark trunks of the trees, the spread of leaves high above them, the soft and dappled light, almost blue by the time it reaches them. For a moment she wishes the others weren’t here. She feels exposed. 

“What are we even looking for?” Eve asks. She’s cold, rubbing her arms, but she doesn’t seem undone by the place the way Ronan does. None of them do. 

“What we’re always looking for,” Gansey says, somewhat unhelpfully.

“Helen is going to hate you,” Eve says, and there’s an edge of real nervousness in her voice -- the kind of stress, Ronan thinks, that comes from being used to actually getting in trouble for causing any kind of inconvenience.

“She’ll text me if she gets too mad,” Gansey says, pulling her phone out of her pocket to check it. “Oh -- there’s no signal.” Something in her posture shifts as she looks at her phone screen, a little tense, a little excited. “Is anyone wearing a watch?” She asks, and Ronan recognizes the careful control of her voice.

“I am -- but it doesn’t seem to be working,” Eve says, flicking at her cheap watch with it’s yellow plastic band. She’s always had a knack for finding clothing and accessories that are inexpensive but cute.

Gansey shows them the screen of her phone, displaying a clock with none of its hands moving. The answer seems obvious to Ronan: time doesn’t work here. It makes sense to her somehow, fits with the strange kinship she feels with the forest, the power she had felt when she touched the tree earlier. But no one else seems aware of the strangeness of the place.

“Is it -- is it because the power is being affected from the energy of the line?”

Ronan rolls her eyes. “Affecting your watch? Your windup watch?” But of course Eve is the one to doubt that something that feels as fundamental as time could break apart.

“It’s true, my phone’s still on. So’s the reader. It’s only that the time has...I wonder if…” But Gansey trails off, for once in her life without a hypothesis. “I want to go on, just a little farther.” She doesn’t leave room for argument. Ronan follows her as she climbs over the rocky path and glances over her shoulder to see Blue and Eve trailing behind, holding hands.

The stream they’re following turns into a wide and shallow pool. Gansey crouches to peer at some fish in the water and Ronan, quickly bored, wanders around the edge of the water to the opposite side where a huge oak tree towers over her. As she steps closer, she sees that the entire trunk is hollowed out, a space large enough that she could step inside it, but some instinct warns her to stay back. Warily, she reaches out and just touches the bark, then snatches her hand back. It’s like the feeling she’d had before when she’d touched the other tree, but amplified by a factor of ten. Like touching an electric fence. Her lips are tingling. As the shock wears off, she realizes that she understands something about the tree. She shakes herself a little. This whole thing, this whole place is getting into her head. But the fact remains that she feels certain: this tree is doing something strange with time. She thinks that if she touched it again she would know more, and she doesn’t want to. Her gut is telling her this isn’t information that she should have. 

She stands by the oak for a moment before her curiosity gets the best of her. “Eve,” she calls, and she hears the other girl’s footsteps coming toward her though she doesn’t turn to look. 

“What is it?” Eve asks, coming to stand next to her. 

“Step inside that tree,” she says, “and tell me what happens.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Lena & Angie for proofing!
> 
> Tumblr for this project: lady-trc  
> My fandom tumblr: psychotic-adam-parrish


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She is standing erect and, as before in the field, somehow regal. Eve, Ronan notices, is not watching. When Gansey opens her eyes, she tilts her head on her shoulder, like a child.
> 
> “What did you see?” Blue asks.
> 
> Gansey’s answer, when it comes, is firm and simple. “I saw Glyndower.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m going to start posting extras for The Raven Girls in the next few weeks. These will be scenes from perspectives other than Ronan’s, so I can add in some of the canon scenes that aren’t in the fic bc of the limited POV, as well as non-canon scenes that I’m adding for kicks. If you have any scenes that you’d particularly like to see, characters you’d like to have interacting, etc etc, please send me asks [here](http://lady-trc.tumblr.com/ask)

Eve looks a little nervous. “Have you gone in?”

Ronan shakes her head. “No. I don’t think I’m supposed to.”

“What do you mean?” She slurs the words “what do you” together a little bit and Ronan has to bite her lip to stop herself from smiling at the sound of it. But she isn’t sure how to answer the question.

“I dunno man, I just feel it. I touched the bark and I just -- just trust me on this.” 

Eve shrugs. “I mean I don’t think anything will happen. It’s just a tree.” Still, her voice sounds fearful.

“Just try it.” 

Eve steps carefully into the cavity in the tree, her hands gripping the edges of it. At this proximity, Ronan can see the freckles that dapple her knuckles. She turns and stands facing Ronan, then closes her eyes. For a few seconds she stands still, face blank, but then she starts to look a little afraid, and then horrified. Her eyes open and she practically throws herself from the tree, her feet skidding on the sandy dirt around the pool of water. Bending over, she puts her hands on her knees and looks for a moment like she’s going to puke. Ronan steps forward, but Eve says, quietly but distinctly, “No.”

“What is it,” Ronan asks. “What happened?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know what that was.” Her accent is thicker than it had been before. 

“Did you see something?”

“Christ, I don’t know what happened,” Eve replies, her voice rising in frustration and what sounds to Ronan like panic. 

There’s the sound of twigs breaking and they both turn to see Gansey and Blue coming toward them. Eve stands upright and rubs her arms. Ronan looks away from them at the tree. She had called Eve because she wasn’t entirely sure she wanted Gansey to see the tree -- or rather, she hadn’t felt entirely sure that Gansey was supposed to see it. But there’s no use trying to prevent that now. 

“Come here and stand in there,” Eve says, pointing to the cavity in the tree. “And tell me if I’m losing my mind.” 

Gansey steps toward Eve, maternal as ever. “Are you okay?”

“Close your eyes. After you stand in there, I mean.”

“Did you go in there,” Gansey asks, turning to Ronan. She shakes her head.

“She’s the one who pointed it out,” Eve says, and there’s a note of accusation in her voice that Ronan doesn’t like.

“I’m not going in there,” she says.

“I don’t mind, I’ll go,” Blue says, already stepping into the hollow trunk. Facing them, he closes his eyes and stands quietly as Eve had. There’s no dramatic change in his expression as there had been in Eve’s, but after a moment Ronan realizes with a start that he’s crying. When he opens his eyes again, he steps calmly out of the tree, but he won’t look at any of them.

“Well?” Gansey says, carefully treading the line between sensitivity and curiosity.

“It’s...something,” he says. After a moment’s hesitation, Gansey steps into the tree herself. Ronan looks away from her for a moment when she sees Eve pulling Blue aside. He stumbles a little on the rocky ground. She wipes the tears from his face, a gesture that tugs at Ronan’s gut, and whispers something to him too low for Ronan to make out, but she can tell from the look on Eve’s face that whatever it is, it’s desperately important to her. Feeling that the moment is private, Ronan turns back to Gansey in the tree. She is standing erect and, as before in the field, somehow regal. Eve, Ronan notices, is not watching. When Gansey opens her eyes, she tilts her head on her shoulder, like a child.

“What did you see?” Blue asks.

Gansey’s answer, when it comes, is firm and simple. “I saw Glyndower.”

Ronan can feel the fast and steady beat of her own heart. She is more certain now than ever that Gansey was not supposed to see this. 

“We need to get back to Helen,” Eve says, and she sounds somehow relieved. Ronan wonders what she had seen in the tree.

“Yes, I guess we should,” Gansey says, and she seems more herself now. “But we’re coming back here.”

They make their way back through the forest, following the stream back to the open field where Helen’s helicopter is still waiting for them. She looks ready to take Gansey’s head off, but Gansey’s mood of elation is untouchable. According to Helen’s watch, they’d been gone for seven minutes and Gansey just keeps saying, “Amazing! Amazing!” as Helen continues to shout over the headset that she could have gotten arrested for landing on private property like that. Eventually all three sitting in the back of the helicopter take off their headphones and sit in silence rather than listening to the dead-end conversation in the front. Ronan is still thinking about the way the clock on Gansey’s phone had stood still and the tears on Blue’s face as he’d stood in the tree, Gansey’s head resting on her shoulder as she said Glyndower’s name. Seven minutes, she thinks. They’d been out there for nearly an hour, between their time in the field, the walk to the pool, three of them taking turns in the tree and walking back. The seven minutes troubles Ronan, though. When did time stop moving? When had those seven minutes elapsed? Does time move only at a fraction of a speed in the forest as it does outside of it, or does it truly stop? Maybe time in and out of the forest are completely disconnected, she thinks. Maybe years might have passed while they were in there, and it was only a chance that made it under ten minutes. The thought unsettles her.

When the helicopter finally lands, the four of them pile out onto the parking lot and watch as Helen takes off again. Then Blue turns to face the rest of them. “It’s impossible. Time couldn’t have stopped while we were in the woods.”

Gansey is already walking away from them as she says, “Not impossible,” over her shoulder. She opens the door and calls for Leah and, getting no response, returns to the group.

Eve is picking at the strap of her watch. “It’s true. According to ley-line theory, time can be a fluid thing right on the line.” 

“What about that thing in the tree? Was it a hallucination? A dream?” Blue, along with the other two who had gone inside the tree, is still for a moment. They don’t meet eyes, and Ronan thinks they must be remembering what they saw. It must have been something frightful.

“I don’t know,” Gansey replies as she pulls her keys out and snatches them out of Ronan’s reach as she makes her usual grab for them. “But I intend to find out. Come on, let’s go.”

“Go? Where?” Blue seems a little unnerved by Gansey’s energy.

“Prison. The dentist. Someplace awful.”

“I have to be back by...I don’t know when. Sometime reasonable?” 

Ronan thinks: this is not a boy who usually needs a curfew. Eve asks, “When’s reasonable?”

“We’ll get you back before you turn into a pumpkin,” Gansey says. Then, pausing before she pulls open the door of the Camaro, she asks, “Is Blue a nickname?”

Ronan glances at Blue and sees that Gansey has pressed a button. She can guess that Blue has had this conversation plenty of times, and is sick of it. Gansey seems to notice too, because she makes a somewhat pathetic attempt to backtrack. “Not that it’s not a cool name. Just that it’s...unusual.”

“Weird-ass,” Ronan says from her side of the car with the end of one of her leather bracelets between her front teeth. 

“Unfortunately, it’s nothing normal. Not like Gansey.”

Ronan thinks she might end up liking this guy after all. Gansey smiles with uncharacteristic impishness and says, “I’ve always like the name Tom.” 

“Tom -- what? Oh! No, no. You can’t just go around naming people other things because you don’t like their real names.”

“I like Blue just fine. Some of my favorite shirts are blue. However, I also like Tom.”

Ronan thinks Gansey may be treading on thin ice but when she looks at Blue there’s just a trace of a smile around his lips. She can sympathize -- it can be hard to know how to react to Gansey’s particular mix of charming and infuriating. Still, he says, “I’m not answering to that.” 

Gansey swings the door open and pushes the front seat down so Eve and Blue can get in the back. Blue glares at her one last time and says again, “I’m not answering to that” before he follows Eve. In the front seat, Ronan delivers a swift kick to the dashboard in the vicinity of the CD player and grins as it starts playing.

“Your sense of what constitutes cool music is frightful,” Gansey says as she settles into her seat, glancing at the CD player with distaste.

“Does it always smell like gasoline,” Blue asks, leaning forward and propping his elbows between Ronan and Gansey.

“Only when it’s running,” Gansey replies cheerfully.

“Is this thing safe?” Blue’s tone doesn’t indicate that he’ll be convinced by any answer to this question other than a flat “no.”

“Safe as life,” Gansey says for the second time that day, and it’s true enough. 

“Where are we going,” Eve asks, and she has to shout because now Gansey has started the car up and it’s making its usual racket. God, Ronan loves this car. Not the way Gansey does, but enough. 

Gansey shouts back to her. “Gelato. Also, Blue’s going to tell us how he knew where the ley line was. We’re going to strategize and decide what the next move is and we’re going to pick Blue’s brain about energy. Eve, you’re going to tell me everything you remember about time and ley lines, and Ronan, I want you to tell me again what you’ve found out about dreamtime and song lines. Before we go back there again, I want to find out everything we can about making sure it’s safe.”

As they drive toward Harry’s for gelato, Ronan and Gansey fight for control of the music, with Ronan predictably winning as Gansey is simultaneously trying not to crash the car. But it’s obvious that Gansey isn’t actually that bothered by the music, she just wants to mess with Ronan. She’s in the kind of mood where she would let Ronan try to teach her to fight and spend the entire time falling over herself giggling and clinging to Ronan’s arm. Ronan can tell already that there’s no way they’re going to have a discussion about time and the ley line over gelato. Gansey is far too jubilant to talk and plan. She’ll tease Blue and and convince Eve to arm wrestle with her and probably flirt with Ronan because she’s a little merciless when she’s happy. They’ll eat too much and Gansey will make Ronan dance with her and Blue will be delivered home at a not-entirely-reasonable hour because Gansey hates when things end, but she’ll sleep all the way through the night. And that’s exactly what happens. 

Ronan has to con Leah into feeding Chainsaw for her, but she doesn’t mind, she’d do anything for this Gansey. She’d do anything for this night never to end, to remain forever suspended in the creeping heat of the approaching Henrietta summer, sitting with her friends at a picnic table overloaded with bowls of gelato. How rare and delicate this happiness is -- but Ronan doesn’t think about that. Instead she commits to memory the image of Eve licking melted gelato off her thumb. Of Gansey ranting happily to Blue about Welsh spelling as he sucks on a spoon with one eyebrow climbing as Gansey continues to talk. Of all of them, together and safe and excited, on the cusp of something monumental.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Lena & Angie for proofing!
> 
> Tumblr for this project: lady-trc  
> My fandom tumblr: psychotic-adam-parrish


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A few weeks after their first trip together, Ronan starts teaching Eve how to drive a manual transmission while the girls wait for Blue to turn up. Eve is a quick learner and Ronan likes teaching her (not to mention the opportunity to put her hand over Eve’s on the stick shift), and her habit of street racing has made her into something of an expert. Most of the instruction happens non-verbally, Ronan’s hand guiding Eve’s through the gears until she gets a fairly good handle on it. It’s an effort not to be distracted by the warmth of Eve’s skin beneath hers, the ridges of her knuckles, the delicate structure of her hand, but it helps that this is essentially second nature for Ronan.

They fall into a pattern of waiting for Blue in the Monmouth parking lot and spending the afternoons and evenings together. Blue would go back home for dinner and then, more often than not, return to Monmouth to talk about their discoveries of the day. Much of the work they do in the weeks following their trip to the forest is logistical: going through county records to learn who the land belongs to, searching for any references to time anomalies in the area, pinpointing, with Blue’s help, where it sits on the ley-line. Ronan finds the work dull and often ends up staring into space and chewing her leather bracelets when she’s supposed to be reading legal documents. When it happens one too many times in an afternoon, Gansey will put a pile of Latin texts in front of her to translate -- mostly about time, some about strange occurrences around where Gansey places the ley-line, a few only tangentially related to Glyndower, or only related in Gansey’s head. She does the work because Gansey has given it to her and she does want to be helpful, even if she’s useless at research. Translation has become for her something like meditation, requiring enough thought that it takes her out of herself. This is what Gansey is good at, she thinks: figuring out what her friends are good at, and putting them to work doing it. 

As time goes on, Ronan feels an increasing desire to go back to the forest. It feels almost like the homesickness she has for the Barns -- not as powerful, not as all-consuming, but more similar than it should be given that one is a place she’s been once and the other is the lifelong home from which she has been exiled. She deals with it by mixing rum from her flask (which Gansey always looks at like a dead animal when she catches a glimpse of it) into the coke that she always gets on their snack runs. Gansey worries about her diet of pop, alcohol, and twizzlers, but this isn’t something Ronan is going to be able to talk out. 

A few weeks after their first trip together, Ronan starts teaching Eve how to drive a manual transmission while the girls wait for Blue to turn up. Eve is a quick learner and Ronan likes teaching her (not to mention the opportunity to put her hand over Eve’s on the stick shift), and her habit of street racing has made her into something of an expert. Most of the instruction happens non-verbally, Ronan’s hand guiding Eve’s through the gears until she gets a fairly good handle on it. It’s an effort not to be distracted by the warmth of Eve’s skin beneath hers, the ridges of her knuckles, the delicate structure of her hand, but it helps that this is essentially second nature for Ronan. Most of the talking is simply Ronan saying, “Here,” as she shifts Eve into the next gear. Eventually, she lets go of Eve’s hand and lets her try it alone, letting out whoops of delight every time Eve nails a shift. Gansey and Leah are watching from from the curb, Leah chewing on the drawstring of her hoodie. Gansey waves happily every time they come around. 

When Eve eventually botches a shift, Ronan’s cursing starts as soon as the engine begins to shudder. Like all of Ronan’s swearing, it’s fluent and energetic and oddly elegant. Eve doesn’t seem upset by it (Ronan would have noticed if she was) so she goes on for a good long time. Cursing, unlike any other form of language, has always been natural for Ronan. It’s a simple and direct expression of Ronan’s most dominant emotion -- anger -- and so it comes easily to her. Here there is no struggle to express anything more complex than irritation. Usually, when she tries to talk to people, it’s a mess. None of what she feels so intensely makes sense in words and the effort of it frustrates her sometimes to tears. She is too physical a thing. Her insides only make sense in motion. When her anger is spent, she finishes, “For the love of -- Parrish, take some care, this is not your mother’s 1971 Honda Civic.”

“They didn’t start making the Civi until ‘73,” Eve replies with her usual steady mildness, and Ronan is tempted to start in on her again when they hear Gansey’s voice.

“Tom! I thought you’d never show up. Ronan is tutoring Eve in the ways of manual transmissions.”

It’s such a typically Gansey sentence that Ronan forgets her anger, both at Eve and at herself for her insufficient knowledge of the history of the Honda Civic. Propping her elbows on the edge of the open window, Blue leans in. Ronan thinks she can smell the same inexpensive body spray that Eve wears to school dances. “Looks like it’s going well. Is that what the smell is?”

Irritated, Ronan gets out and slams the door, walking over to the the curb where Leah and Gansey had been sitting while the others swarm around Blue. Leah, officially the only one allowed to touch his hair, is tugging gently at it as she tells him something or other about her day and Eve is looking up at him adoringly and Gansey has her Eager To Impress face on and Ronan feels like shit. She puts her head up though when Gansey announces, “Okay, let’s go.” 

Ronan automatically gets up and heads toward the Camaro as Eve asks, “Where today?” She almost trips when Gansey responds simply, “The wood.” Ronan’s heart races as she thinks -- I’m going back, I’m going back, I’m going back. And, illogically -- I’m going home. “Time is wasting,” Gansey says, pulling out the keys to the Pig and putting them behind her back as Ronan makes her habitual grab for them on the way to the passenger side door. 

“We have to be back in two hours. I just fed Chainsaw but he’ll need it again,” Ronan says. His feeding schedule isn’t quite as strict now as it was in the first couple weeks, but she doesn’t like to keep him waiting long for meals. 

“This is precisely why I didn’t want to have a baby with you,” Gansey says pleasantly and Ronan rolls her eyes even though she’s smiling. It’s difficult not to smile. She’s going back. 

“Gansey, don’t we have any heat?” Eve asks, leaning forward. Now that Ronan thinks about it, she realizes that it’s a chilly afternoon, but she’s too preoccupied to be bothered by it. 

“If it starts,” Gansey says. The Pig is being its usual self in its unwillingness to start. 

“Gas,” Eve says, and Ronan likes the sound of the word in Eve’s mouth. “Give it more gas.”

“That is with gas,” Gansey says, and Ronan, losing patience, slams her hand down on Gansey’s knee and the engine catches.

“Why thank you,” Gansey says in the way only Gansey can, absolutely polite with just a touch of vitriol. 

As they drive out of Henrietta, Ronan ignores the complaints of the others that it’s too damn cold to keep the windows open and leans out of the car, staring up at the trees lining the road with their white buds, just beginning to open. In a few weeks, the place will be filled with flowers. She can’t keep still. She’s going back, she’s going back, she’s going back. It doesn’t feel, she thinks, the way that going home -- really home -- would feel, but it’s something like it. She turns on the radio and fiddles with it until Gansey slaps her hand away and turns it to some unbearable Oldies station so she just leans out the window again and lets the wind drown out the sound of the music. 

The road to the forest is long and winding, not nearly as direct as the helicopter’s path there, but despite her impatience to get there, Ronan is glad that they’re travelling by ground. It’s not just that she loves driving, it’s that most of the trip there is nearly as lovely as the woods themselves. Long stretches of road are canopied by trees and the rest is surrounded by wide fields that make the grey sky above them look infinitely large. It’s not home, but it feels more like home than any other place she’s ever been. 

When they get close, Gansey pulls the car into the driveway of an empty cabin, the kind clearly only occupied in the summer, and they get out to walk. The cold of the day hits Ronan a little now, and she’s glad she brought her jacket with her. Blue seems a little regretful, dressed as he is in a pair of torn-up jeans and a very loosely crocheted sweater through which Ronan can see a great deal of skin. She isn’t entirely surprised to notice surgical scars across his chest. He looks much better in it than Ronan would have previously admitted it was possible to look in an oversized and clearly homemade sweater, but it might be the wrong choice on an unseasonally chilly day. He’s hugging his sides and walking a little more briskly than necessary. Still, Gansey is in the lead as she always is. A born leader, her last evaluation from Aglionby had called her. It would have been equally accurate to call Ronan a born follower -- a trait she’s never tried to hide -- but the language in her evaluation had run more along the lines of troublemaker and unwilling to appreciate what the school has to offer. It doesn’t bother her, but she wishes Declan didn’t get a copy as well.

When they reach the field with the raven, Gansey pauses near the treeline and they all arrange themselves around her. In this weather, under this wide grey sky, the place looks more threatening, and it makes Ronan’s skin tingle pleasantly. It’s a place that knows how to defend itself, she thinks. It’s like her. 

“I feel watched,” Blue says, and Ronan has to fight the urge to respond you are. She doesn’t know why, but she’s quite certain of it. They are, all of them, being watched. By whom, she couldn’t say. 

Gansey has a more reasonable response for him. “High EMF readings can do that. Haunting cases have often come down to old, exposed wiring. High readings can make you feel watched. Unnerved. Nauseous, suspicious. It plays with the hardwiring of your brain.” She says this last part slowly, as though she’s thinking about what this place, with its strange energy, might be doing to her mind. 

“But it can go the other way, too,” Eve notes. “High readings can give spirits the power they need to manifest, right? So you are more likely to be watched or haunted even as you’re feeling watched or haunted.”

“And of course water can reverse that, too. Make EMF and energy into positive feelings.”

“Hence all the healing springs crap out there,” Ronan says, though her head isn’t entirely in the conversation. She’s still thinking about how Gansey had said EMF readings make people feel. She’s thinks that Gansey is probably feeling everything she had described, and so are the rest of them. Ronan certainly is, but she wonders if the rest of them, like her, feel a giddiness, almost even a joy along with the rest of it. By the looks on their faces, she doubts it. She wonders again, uselessly, what it is about this place that draws her so powerfully. Like nostalgia, she thinks, but that doesn’t make any sense. None of this makes any sense. 

“Well, the water’s in there, not out here,” Blue says finally. “Are we going in?”

“Are we invited in?” Eve asks, typically concerned with politeness even when it comes to trees.

“I think you invite yourself in,” Leah says, and steps into the trees. Her heart thudding out the word home, home, home, Ronan whispers a curse and follows her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Lena & Angie for proofing!
> 
> Tumblr for this project: lady-trc  
> My fandom tumblr: psychotic-adam-parrish


	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ronan begins to walk deeper into the woods and realizes that she has been stepping over branches on the forest floor and the protruding roots of trees by instinct, even though she hasn’t been looking at her feet. The hair stands up on the back of her neck. It’s silly, she tells herself, this fear. But she can’t help it, it’s more her body than her mind that responds to this place.

If the forest had been dark on their first visit, it is now almost impenetrable. There’s little enough light in the field, and almost none of it has made its way through the dense canopy of leaves above. Ronan doesn’t see Leah anywhere. It’s not exactly foggy, but there’s something hazy about the air around her. She can only see a couple feet ahead of her. 

Behind her, she hears Gansey. “Leah? Leah where did you go?”

Then, Leah’s voice, a little distant. “I didn’t go anywhere.”

“What did you see?” Gansey asks her. 

“Nothing.”

Ronan begins to walk deeper into the woods and realizes that she has been stepping over branches on the forest floor and the protruding roots of trees by instinct, even though she hasn’t been looking at her feet. The hair stands up on the back of her neck. It’s silly, she tells herself, this fear. But she can’t help it, it’s more her body than her mind that responds to this place. “Where are we going?” She asks, not turning to look at the others. As she had the last time they had come to the woods, she feels a certain discomfort at being seen by them here. Unmasked -- that’s the feeling. 

“Back the same way, I guess. Proper experiment recreates the conditions, doesn’t it? The creek’s shallower this time, though. Harder to see. It wasn’t far, was it?”

Trust Gansey to make a trip to a magical forest into a science experiment. Ronan has the sense that nothing about this forest will be exactly as they remember it. It seems to be shifting under her feet, subtle but distinct. A living thing. As they walk deeper into the trees, following the stream, it dries up -- not like last time when it had widened and deepened and feed into a still pool. Ronan had been been right.

“We’ve been misdirected,” Gansey says, and Ronan glances back at her. If she, too, understands that this is a place with agency, maybe Ronan isn’t the only one connected to it. Or maybe Gansey just has a strong sense of intuition.

Blue is looking up when he says, “Also, did you notice the trees.” The rest of them look up as well when he says it, and Ronan immediately understands what he means. The color of the leaves has changed and now the canopy is no longer green but a vivid array of oranges and yellows and reds. Over the course of the few minutes they’ve spent walking, the season has changed. Ronan thinks she should have noticed the change in the warmth of the light.

“Gansey, what time do you have?” Eve asks. 

“It’s 5:27 P.M. Second hand’s still running.”

Ronan is struck by anxiety for Chainsaw. They’d left at around a quarter to four, so by Gansey’s watch she should be feeding him again in fifteen minutes. But she doesn’t know what time it is in Monmouth. She doesn’t know what time it will be when they leave the forest. She wishes she could have brought him with her.

“Gansey!” Leah calls from from somewhere out of sight. “There’s writing over here!” 

They climb over some rocks in the direction of Leah’s voice and see her standing by what is almost a wall of stone, nearly as tall as Leah. There are words written across it in what looks like it might be the juice of berries or blood, and the sight of it evokes another twinge of familiarity and fear in Ronan. The feeling only intensifies when she recognizes the shape of the words.

“What language is that?” Blue asks.

“Latin,” Eve and Ronan say together. Ronan kneels next to the rock to read the words. Her heart feels too big for her chest.

“What does it say?” Gansey asks. Gansey, despite her multiple years of instruction in the language, is less than proficient. 

“It’s a joke. This first part. The Latin is pretty crappy.” The bad Latin strikes her as strange. These are not the typical mistakes of a student. They’re the kind of mistakes she makes when she does her homework too late at night, when her mind is too sleepy to focus. 

“A joke? About what?” Gansey asks.

“You wouldn’t find it funny,” Ronan replies, and it’s true -- she wouldn’t. Gansey has never liked dirty jokes. But Ronan thinks it’s funny. An idea is pressing at the edge of her mind but it frightens her and she doesn’t want to consider it too closely, as though that would somehow make it true.

“Why is there a joke written on a random stone?” Eve asks. Ronan can’t speak because the answer is becoming too obvious for her to ignore.

Gansey’s voice behind her. “Ronan?” 

“There’s a joke in case I didn’t recognize my own handwriting.” She keeps her voice level, but it’s a challenge. Because there’s no doubting it now; even traced on a stone, the letters are clearly hers and even if she could have convinced herself that that was a coincidence, the joke with its distinct brand of humor is undeniably her own. She had been so happy to come back here and in her excitement she had somehow forgotten how eerie the forest and its connection to her can be. “I don’t understand.” She isn’t able to keep her voice quite as steady this time.

Gansey’s voice has the soothing tone she’s perfected over her time with Ronan, the one she usually uses to keep Ronan from doing something stupid. “We saw before how the ley line played with time. We can see it right now on my watch. It’s flexible. You haven’t been here before, Ronan, but it doesn’t mean you didn’t come here later. Minutes later. Days, years, leave yourself a message, write a joke so you’d believe it was you. Knowing there was a chance time might fold you here to find it.”

It makes Ronan feel a little better. The strange thing is the ley line, not herself. Still, she isn’t sure Gansey is right. She has been here before, or else her memory is as flexible as time on the line. 

“Then what does it say after the joke?” Blue asks, a little hesitant.

“Arbors loqui latine,” Ronan says, and as always, the words feel easier in her mouth than English ever does. Strange, given how rarely she speaks it. Sometimes she thinks she really is a creature from another time. “The trees speak Latin,” she adds, translating for Blue -- though there’s a chance that Gansey hadn’t understood either. Her Latin has always been abysmal. The words on the rock seem like nonsense, but Ronan thinks they must be true.

“And the last line? That word doesn’t look like Latin,” Gansey says, leaning over Ronan’s shoulder to look more closely at the rock. 

“Nomine appellant. Call it by name.” Then, touching the last word, the one Gansey says looks like a different language -- “Cabeswater.” Cabeswater, Cabeswater, Cabeswater. It feels to her like her own name and, like everything else here, she has no good explanation for it. 

“Cabeswater,” Gansey says, her voice almost reverent. 

“I vote we find water, to make the energy do whatever Ronan said it would do that was better,” Blue says. Ronan turns to see him hugging himself, and it doesn’t look like it’s just because he’s cold. Apparently she isn’t the only one feeling unsettled. “And then...I think we should say something in Latin.”

Gansey nods. She likes it when decisions are made. “It sounds like a plan. Should we go back the way we came, or go farther in?”

“Farther,” Leah says, and no one questions her. They continue into the forest, listening for the sounds of a stream. Ronan wonders how they’ll find their way out again. 

The farther they go, the more the temperature drops. Soon enough, the leaves fall, crunching under their feet. Again, the season turning. Eve names it: “Winter.” Ronan is the best dressed for the temperature, but even she is shivering. She wishes she’d worn a hoodie -- usually in the winter she wears a beanie and her shaved skull is freezing. 

“And there’s water,” Blue says, pointing out a thin stream tumbling over a few rocks a yard or so away from them. 

“Okay, what did you want to say in Latin,” Gansey asks him. Ronan looks up to where the canopy of leaves had been, but now there are only the skeletal, intersecting branches of the trees crisscrossing against a gray sky. She looks back down to see Blue watching her tentatively.

“Can you just say hello? That’s polite.”

Resisting the urge to roll her eyes, she says “Salve. That actually means be well.”

“Super job,” he says, and Ronan is disconcerted by the fact that she isn’t sure whether or not he’s being sarcastic. “Ask if they’ll speak with us.”

She can’t quite believe that she’s taking an order to talk to a magical forest, but she does it anyway, with the very small amount of grace she can muster. “Loquere tu nobis?” And, in the ensuing silence, “Nothing. What did you expect?”

“Quiet,” Gansey says. She’s staring at nothing and she looks a little afraid, and that in turn frightens Ronan. “Do you hear that?”

Eve and Blue shake their heads, but Leah says “I do.” Gansey looks a bit less uncomfortable. 

“Ask them to say it again,” Gansey tells Ronan, and Ronan repeats herself. After a pause, Gansey begins speaking Latin. It’s faltering and poorly enunciated, but it’s better Latin than she’s ever heard Gansey speak before. 

“They say they’ve been speaking to you already,” she translates, “but you haven’t been listening. Gansey, are you messing with me? Do you really hear something?” Ronan hadn’t heard anything but the continued rustling of the bare branches of the trees and it seems wrong to her somehow that Gansey and Leah would hear something when she doesn’t. She’s getting jealous, she realizes, of a goddamn forest. This is ludicrous.

“Do you think Gansey’s Latin is that good?” Eve says, and Ronan has to admit she’d been thinking the same thing. “It was your handwriting on the rock, Ronan, that said they spoke Latin. Shut up.” Ronan ducks her head and doesn’t ask again. 

Gansey speaks another phrase, and again Ronan translates. “They say they’re happy to see the psychic’s son.” She tries to remember when she’d acquired the Latin word for psychic. She can’t imagine another instance in which it would come in useful.

“Me!” Blue says. Of all of them, his mood seems the most improved by the presence of water. Given his family background, Ronan has to wonder if he’s somehow more sensitive to the effects of energy. He is, after all, a kind of amplifier. 

Gansey speaks again and this time, for the first time, she doesn’t understand one of the words. “I don’t know what that means,” she says, scratching the back of her head. “They’re also happy to once more see -- I don’t know what that word is. Greywaren? If it’s Latin, I don’t know it.” She doesn’t think it sounds Latin. It sounds like whatever language “Cabeswater” is. 

There’s a brief pause then Gansey looks at her, and there’s that fearful look again. Ronan wants to protect her but there’s nothing to protect her from and it makes Ronan feel small and useless. She digs her nails into the palms of her hands. When Gansey speaks, her voice is very soft, as though she’s trying not to alarm Ronan, not to spook her. Like she’s speaking to a dog who might bite if she doesn’t approach it with sufficient care. “It’s you,” she says. “Ronan Lynch. They said your name. It’s you they’re happy to see again.”

She is careful to keep her face studiously blank, but her heart is beating and beating and beating. She had been right all along. This place knows her, knows her name, it recognizes her and is glad to see her. Glad to see her again. It isn’t just referring to her last visit. There is some kind of intimacy between herself and Cabeswater. She wishes she was alone and she wishes she could speak with the trees herself and she wishes she knew why she feels as though she recognizes every tree around her. The other four are staring at her and so she stands very still and she breathes until her heart is no longer leaping in her throat and she buries everything that she is feeling: her fear and her uncertainty and her strange joy that this place has called her, too, by name.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Lena & Angie for proofing!
> 
> Tumblr for this project: lady-trc  
> My fandom tumblr: psychotic-adam-parrish


	16. Chapter 16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Ask them if they know where Glyndower is.”
> 
> It’s the question Ronan has been waiting for, and she translates with ease. Almost immediately after she’s posed the question, she sees Gansey’s face fall. “No,” she says, softly. She looks more than disappointed -- she looks gutted. Maybe she’s aware of it, or at least aware of the rest of them watching her, because she turns away with something like shame.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for emetophobia 
> 
> At some point in the next couple weeks, this fic will be going on hiatus. There's a scene near the end of Raven Boys where Ronan gets pulled into the vision tree and what he sees never gets explained. I have a hunch that it may be explained in The Raven King and might be significant, and since I'm working in Ronan's POV, I need to know whether or not it's important before I write that chapter of Raven Girls. Which means that I can't finish until TRK gets published, unfortunately. During this hiatus, I will be posting extras -- these will be "deleted scenes" from the original canon that are from points of view other than Ronan's, as well as some non-canon short fics just for fun. So, I will be posting SOMETHING Raven Girls related every Monday/Wednesday/Friday, but the fic itself won't be updating again until the beginning of May. I'm so sorry for the interruption & I hope you'll be willing to wait!

“It’s you. Ronan Lynch. They said your name. It’s you they’re happy to see again.”

“Again,” Blue says, holding his face and looking up. “Amazing. The trees? Amazing.”

“Why can only you and Leah hear them?” Eve asks.

Fumblingly, Gansey attempts to translate Eve’s question into Latin, but she gives up after a moment and asks Ronan. Ronan is glad for the task. It gives her a chance to put aside everything going through her mind right now. “God, Gansey,” she says, crossing her arms tightly across her chest. “If you paid attention in --” Still, it’s not exactly her place to lecture Gansey about not being a model student. “Cur non te audimus?”

When Gansey speaks again, it’s in English. “The road isn’t awake.”

“The...ley line? But that doesn’t explain why only you and Leah can hear it.”

No, Ronan thinks -- it definitely doesn’t. It makes her wonder if it’s not a question the trees are willing to answer. They, too, have an agenda.

Another pause, and then Gansey repeats what she’d heard: “Si expergefacere via, erimus in debitum.”

“If you wake they line, they’ll be in your debt.” Ronan wonders what it means to have trees in one’s debt. What might a tree do for one in its favor? What could it do?

“Ask them if they know where Glyndower is.”

It’s the question Ronan has been waiting for, and she translates with ease. Almost immediately after she’s posed the question, she sees Gansey’s face fall. “No,” she says, softly. She looks more than disappointed -- she looks gutted. Maybe she’s aware of it, or at least aware of the rest of them watching her, because she turns away with something like shame. “It’s very cold,” she says. “Valde frigida. What’s the way out? Please? Amabo te, ubi exitum?”

As Gansey and Leah repeat the Latin of the trees, Ronan does her best to keep up and follow along, but the instructions are long and complicated and include several words that test even her extensive vocabulary. “Sorry,” she says, chewing her lip. “It’s difficult. It’s -- they said that we need to go back through the year. Against...the road. The line. They said if we go back along the creek and turn left at the big...sycamore? Platnus? I think sycamore. Then we’ll find something they think we want to find. Then we’ll be able to walk out of the woods and find our way back to our...to our day. I don’t know. I missed parts, but I think -- I’m sorry.” Ronan hates not being able to help, and the fact that the others should know enough Latin to translate parts of it as well does little to make her feel better about herself. 

Gansey touches her shoulder. “It’s okay. You’re doing really well.” Trust Gansey to take the time to comfort Ronan in the midst of a journey through a magical forest. And it does make Ronan feel better, if only because Gansey had noticed that she was upset. Besides, some doggish instinct in her makes her heart lift every time Gansey tells her she’s done a good job. She thinks vaguely that this is something that a different sort of girl would be ashamed of.

Gansey turns to Eve and softly asks her if she thinks they should trust the trees. It’s a question that seems entirely nonsensical to Ronan, but she reminds herself that not all of them have the same sense of familiarity with this place than Ronan does, nor the trust that comes with it. And she doesn’t want to explain to the rest of them that she thinks that this forest cares about her -- that it loves her.

“I think we should trust them. They knew me and Ronan,” Blue says, glancing at Ronan. “Somehow. And that rock didn’t say not to. Right?” 

“Back we go. Careful not to slip. Gratias,” she says, this time addressing the trees. “Reveniemus.”

“What did you say?” Blue asks her. 

This time, Eve translates. “Thanks. And that’d we’d be back.”

Gansey leads them along the creek, deeper into the forest. As they go, the seasons change again. First the chill in the air begins to fade and the ground beneath them changes from hard, frozen dirt to squelching mud. It smells green, the scent after rain in the spring. Ronan breathes deeply, as though she could fill her entire body with that smell, that greenness. The mud turns to sparse grass in firm earth as the temperature continues to rise, and Ronan realizes as she warms up how cold her hands and feet and head had been in the winter section of the forest. She shrugs off her jacket and slings it over her shoulder. The heat bothers her more than the cold had. Though she’s grateful for the return of feeling to her extremities and she prefers the lush green leaves above them to the stark bareness of the winter trees, sweat is beginning to dampen her lower back and there are insects buzzing around her. She’s always hated the discomfort of summer, the stickiness of it. 

At last, Blue points to a sycamore by the side of the creek. “There. This is where we turn, isn’t it?”

“We missed summer before, when we came the other way. We went straight to fall,” Eve comments. She’s pulled her hair back off her neck into a ponytail and she has her hands in the pockets of her jeans. It seems right to Ronan that Eve should be so comfortable in the heat, right that summer should be her natural habitat. She looks lovely and flushed and that combined with Ronan’s increased irritability in the warm weather pisses Ronan off. 

A bug lands on her arm and she slaps at it. “Magical mosquitos. What a great place this is.”

Turning left, they keep walking, Gansey in the lead with Blue and Eve close behind her. Ronan trails behind, looking back to where Leah stands still by the sycamore. She looks a little ill.

“You okay, man?” Ronan asks.

Leah nods, but her shoulders are tense, bunched up around her neck. It’s how she stands when she wants to be left alone, so despite her doubts Ronan says, “Okay,” and keeps walking, increasing her pace to catch up to the others. The noise of insects rises to a steady hum around them and Ronan wishes she could pull off her tanktop too. She doesn’t really want to be a boy, but it’s often the most mundane of things that make her wish she was one. The trees begin to thin and eventually they step out into a clearing. They’re in direct sunlight now, which only makes the heat worse. 

In the clearing there’s a car, which Ronan thinks must have been what the trees had been directing them toward, though why they would want to see an apparently abandoned car is lost on Ronan. Abandoned, she thinks, because the red paint of the Mustang is almost invisible under the thick coat of pollen that covers it. The original color of the vehicle is only visible near its bottom edge. But as she approaches the car, Ronan can make out all the detailing on it. Whoever owned this had spent a lot of time and money it. Ronan doesn’t particularly like it. She kicks one of the oversized tires. “Bling.”

Eve is leaning over the trunk to wipe pollen off of the back window. “Look,” she says, wiping her hand off on her pants and leaving a trail of yellow across her thigh. The others gather around to see the two bumper stickers that had been under the debris. One is a Blink-182 sticker, and the other has Aglionby’s name and crest on it. 

“Figures,” Blue says. Ronan is surprised, though. Not that a car this expensive would belong to an Aglionby girl, but by the fact that she doesn’t recognize it. Aglionby isn’t that big a school, and Ronan pays a lot of attention to the cars in the parking lot. Especially the expensive ones. If this car belongs to one of her classmates, she should know it. She would know it. And that means that either this car has been here a long time, or some Aglionby alum remained in Henrietta long after graduating. It’s not so much that the former seems probable as that the latter is so unlikely that the first possibility looks like the only real one. 

Ronan walks around the car, trailing a finger through the pollen as she goes. She tugs at the handle of the passenger side door, not really expecting it to open, but it does. Looking into the front seat, she lets out a short bark of a laugh. “There’s a mummified hamburger in here.” The others come to look inside. Everything about this seems off to Ronan. An Aglionby car she’s never seen, a burger abandoned as though the owner was planning to return in a few minutes when the amount of pollen indicates that it’s been months at the very least, an apparently much-loved Mustang left to rot in a field. 

“Pop the trunk,” Gansey instructs, and Ronan obliges. They move around to the back of the car again. The sprawl of instruments in the trunk is familiar to Ronan, but not in the strange, incomprehensible way that the forest had been. She sees these kinds of tools every day because Gansey owns newer, nicer versions of most of them. 

“It’s a dowsing rod,” Gansey says, lifting one of them from the trunk. It’s a device Ronan has watched Gansey use dozens of times, though she’s still not entirely convinced that it works. 

“Coincidence,” Eve says, knowing that it isn’t. 

There’s a moment of silence as Gansey looks at the rod. Then she seems to come back to herself and glances around. “Where’s Blue and Leah?”

Ronan looks around too. Blue had been there just moments ago, but now she isn’t sure if Leah had ever come into the clearing. 

Blue reappears, coming into the clearing from the trees just behind them and says, “Leah’s throwing up.”

“Why is she doing that? Is she sick?” Gansey asks with her typical discomfort at things running not according to plan. 

“I’ll ask her as soon as she’s finished puking,” Blue says, rolling his eyes. 

Ronan grins at the Gansey’s expression. “I think you’ll find that Gansey prefers the word vomiting,” she says. Gansey is remarkably teasable, but her sense of propriety in reference to all bodily functions is one of Ronan’s favorite things to make fun of. “Or evacuating.” 

“I think retching is the most specific word, in this case.” 

Ronan peers into the wood. This is familiar ground for her. “Retching” is how she would describe Leah’s late night attacks of sickness, most of which Ronan is there for. “Where is she? Leah!” She calls as she goes back into the woods. Only a few feet from the start of the clearing, Leah is standing with one hand against a tree, supporting herself, and the other on her knee. She’s bent almost double and is, as Blue had said, retching. Not actually puking, but coughing and gagging. “You alright, dude?” She asks.

Leah looks up at Ronan and her face looks strange. There are heavy rings around her eyes that Ronan hadn’t noticed earlier and the perpetual smudge on her cheek is dark. It looks as ominous as Eve’s bruise. She shrugs instead of speaking and then clutches at her stomach, gagging again. 

“Hey,” Ronan says, walking up to her and rubbing her back. “You’ll be okay. Would it help to sit down?”

“Maybe, yeah,” Leah says, and they both sit down on the forest floor. 

“What’s up?” Ronan asks. She’s hesitant to say even that. Much of her friendship with Leah is based on the fact that they won’t push each other for information that they don’t want to give. Leah has never had Gansey’s habit of trying to get her to talk about her feelings. 

“I don’t like it here,” she says. It’s a very Leah response, and this somehow comforts Ronan.

“We’ll probably be leaving soon. I think we’ve found more than Gansey was expecting.” She pauses for a moment, then asks, “Did you see the car out there?”

She doesn’t get an answer to this though, as Leah has another bout of sickness and leans over, arms wrapped around herself. She moans softly when it’s over and Ronan doesn’t ask any more questions. Leah is shaking badly so Ronan puts an arm around her and rubs her shoulder. Leah folds herself against Ronan’s side with her head on her shoulder and the shivering subsides, though her skin is as cold as ever.

Eventually the other three turn up and Ronan and Leah get to their feet.

“We’re going to head out,” Gansey says. “I’m not sure it’s safe. It seems like whoever owns that car is long gone but with the way time works here, it seems possible that they’re still in the woods. And if they’re looking for the ley line too we can’t be sure how they’d react to learning that they aren’t the only ones looking.”

“You okay, Leah?” Blue asks.

“I’m okay.”

They walk back toward the sycamore and then back along the creek, through the winter and the fall and back into spring, where the shape of the raven is sprawled across the meadow. Back in the Camaro, Gansey turns the heat on and drives back to Henrietta, speeding the whole way. They don’t talk about the car or the trees or the fact that the forest had known Ronan’s name or how Leah had started throwing up. It feels like there are too many things to say for any of them to be said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Lena & Angie for proofing!
> 
> Tumblr for this project: lady-trc  
> My fandom tumblr: psychotic-adam-parrish


	17. Chapter 17

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And Ronan remembers all the times Leah had said “I’ve been dead seven years.” But it’s a joke. It’s a stupid joke and one that Ronan has always loved because it’s so weird and so pointless and so Leah. It’s just a joke, it has to be. She takes a deep and shuddering breath. It isn’t going to matter how many times she tells herself that because Leah had just appeared out of nowhere and she had looked miserable and scared as she repeated “I told you,” to Gansey, and this isn’t a joke. Gansey had found her body. Gansey had seen her bones. Leah is dead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry to be posting so late in the day! I had a bit of a busy evening. 
> 
> Warning for mention of disordered eating

A little more than a week later, Ronan begs off an exploring trip to take care of Chainsaw. She’s been letting the feedings get a little irregular due to all the time she’s been spending on the Glyndower hunt, and she feels bad about it. Chainsaw seems to be doing okay, but they’re overdue for a day together. Eve has work so Gansey goes alone to pick Blue up. It’s late evening before Gansey gets back, but Ronan isn’t worried until she hears the door bang open and Gansey shouting into the empty apartment.

“Leah! We need to talk. Leah!”

Cupping Chainsaw to her chest, Ronan opens the door. The main room of the apartment is still dark and it takes a moment for her eyes to adjust. “Man, you’re back late.” She spots Eve standing by the door. “Parrish, I thought you were working.”

“I was,” Eve says pointedly, turning on the lights. Ronan frowns. It must be some kind of emergency for Gansey to pull Eve out of work.

“Where’s Leah?” Gansey asks. She’s striding around the room frantically. Ronan doesn’t like seeing her like this, but she can’t see why Gansey would be so worked up about Leah. Leah, who never gets into trouble unless it involves Ronan, and Ronan has just spent a peaceful day in her room with her bird. Under the circumstances, it’s hard to imagine that Leah is doing anything more interesting than her homework.

“She’s out,” Ronan says.

“No, she is not,” Gansey says, and she actually sounds angry. “Leah!” She’s stopped looking around the room and is now looking up, as though their friend might have developed a sudden aptitude for flight.

Gansey turns to Eve. “Eve, what is Leah’s last name?”

After a strange moment, Eve says, “I don’t know.” Ronan realizes that she doesn’t know either. It doesn’t strike her as too terribly strange, though. She’s always just been Leah. She calls Eve by her last name most of the time, and Gansey’s last name is the only one she goes by, but it’s not like that with Leah.

“It’s Czerny, by the way. Zerny. Chair-knee. However it’s pronounced. Leah Czerny. I know you’re here, Leah!”

Ronan is now officially more worried about Gansey than she is about Leah. “Dude, you’re flipped.”

“Open her door,” Gansey orders. “Tell me what’s in there.”

Ronan steps over to Leah’s room and swings the door open. Inside the bed is neatly made. There’s no mess anywhere. “It looks like a nunnery as usual. All the personality of a mental facility. What am I looking for? Drugs? Boys? Girls? Guns?” All of these seem highly improbable, though a large store of pot might explain Leah’s unusually high level of calm, as well as the extensive amount of time she spends alone in her room. But Ronan has never smelled it in the apartment, and Leah’s never been that sneaky.

“Tell me which classes you share with Leah,” Gansey demands.

“None.”

“Me neither. Nor Eve,” she adds when Eve nods in response to her questioning look. “How is that possible? When does she eat? Have you ever seen her eat?”

“I don’t really care.” It’s about as close as Ronan will come to lying. She’s long been worried about Leah’s eating habits, or lack thereof, but she’s never asked Leah about it and given that she’s always seemed healthy enough, Ronan has always assumed that if she has an issue, it’s with people seeing her eat. She’d figured that Leah has food in her room and eats in there, alone.

“Does she pay rent? When did she move in? Have you ever questioned it?”

“Dude, you have really left the reservation,” Ronan says. Leah has always been solitary and private and Gansey’s questions seem to her an unwelcome invasion. “What is your problem?”

“I spent the afternoon with the police. I went out with Blue to the church – Don’t look at me like that, both of you. The point is this. We found a body. Rotted to bones. Do you know whose it was?”

Gansey meets Ronan’s eyes and holds her gaze. Ronan understands what Gansey is implying, but it seems so flatly impossible that she can’t even bring herself to be concerned. After all, Gansey has a long history of jumping to wild and supernatural conclusions, and while Ronan has to admit that she’s right a disconcerting amount of the time, she isn’t infallible.

Then the apartment door slams and they all turn to look at it. For a moment Ronan thinks Eve had lost patience with the conversation, but she’s too far from the door to have touched it.

Then, Leah’s voice, from behind them. “Mine.” They all turn to see Leah standing in the doorframe of her room with her hands in her pockets.

For the first time since the start of the conversation, Ronan feels real fear prickling at the back of her neck. “Your room was empty. I just looked in it.”

“I told you,” Leah says, and there’s a whining tone to her voice, the way she sounds when she’s worried that she’s going to get blamed for something she didn’t do. It’s a familiar enough tone to Ronan, given how often she gets Leah in trouble. “I told everyone.”

“She’s dead. You’re really dead, aren’t you?” Gansey asks, her voice now absurdly calmer than it had been before.

“I told you.”

And Ronan remembers all the times Leah had said “I’ve been dead seven years.” But it’s a joke. It’s a stupid joke and one that Ronan has always loved because it’s so weird and so pointless and so Leah. It’s just a joke, it has to be. She takes a deep and shuddering breath. It isn’t going to matter how many times she tells herself that because Leah had just appeared out of nowhere and she had looked miserable and scared as she repeated “I told you,” to Gansey, and this isn’t a joke. Gansey had found her body. Gansey had seen her bones. Leah is dead. Ronan’s mouth is dry. She’s never been good at finding the right thing to say and most of the time she isn’t even trying, but now she wishes there was something vaguely appropriate or comforting that she could tell her dead friend. In the absence of that, she says, “Shit, man, all those nights you gave me grief about keeping you awake, and you don’t even need to sleep.”

When Eve speaks, her voice is very soft, but it seems to be so more out of fear than gentleness. “How did you die?”

Leah’s head shrinks back into the comfort of her hoodie, shadowing her face. Gansey is watching her carefully when she says, “No, that’s not the question, is it? The question is: Who killed you? If you can tell me I can find a way to put the police on the trail.”

Ronan wants to tell her to shut up. She herself would do anything to get revenge for her mother’s death but it seems less than kind to confront Leah about her own death like this. For the moment, Ronan doesn’t want to know who killed Leah, and she doesn’t want Leah to have to name her murderer. All she wants to do right now is grieve. As if in response to her thought, Chainsaw begins to shriek -- a dreadful, painful noise. Leah looks even more frightened than she had before. Ronan holds Chainsaw closer and covers his head with her hand to make him calm down, but she wishes she could let him go on, wishes she could just say oh, I know. 

Once the sound has subsided, Leah turns back to Gansey. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

It’s a reasonable answer and Gansey seems to acknowledge this. She’s calmed down since she first came into the apartment, shouting for Leah. “Okay. Okay. What would you like to do?”

“I’d like…” She trails off, which is typical of her but more concerning now that they all know she’s dead. What had seemed before like shyness looks now more like the flickering of a ghost. Eve and Ronan meet eyes looking toward Gansey. 

“Leah?” Gansey says, still looking at the doorway where she’d been. When Ronan turns back, there’s no one there. She strides forward and pushes the door open, stepping inside and looking around at the neat and vacant room. Now that Leah is gone and she doesn’t have to worry about frightening or upsetting her, Ronan begins to vent her feelings, swearing loudly and fluently and with great force. When she runs out of breath, she holds her head with one hand, the other still clutching Chainsaw close. Chainsaw, whose warm body moving against her hand is more alive than Leah is, though he had come from Ronan’s mind.

“What’s going on?” Gansey asks, voice small and afraid and utterly unlike herself.

Eve’s voice is much steadier when she replies. “We’re being haunted.”

*

Ronan has never been good at grief. Her method of dealing with loss has always been a mixture of alcohol and violence which she knows from experience and Gansey’s lectures is deeply unhealthy, but she has yet to find another way. 

Since the discovery of her bones, Leah hasn’t been around much and Ronan’s grief over this and the knowledge that her friend had been murdered seven years ago (when Ronan herself had been young and happy) is taking the form of locking herself in her room with Chainsaw and a bottle of whiskey and music on her headphones loud enough to dull her thoughts if not to drown them. She sleeps erratically but is meticulous in the maintenance of Chainsaw’s feeding schedule, though he’s finally almost old enough that he soon won’t need to be fed quite as often. 

When she dreams, Leah is often there, standing among the trees with her face turned from Ronan, unwilling to speak to her. Sometimes she tries to pull her back from her dreams, as though she could save her this way, but it never works. Even if it did, she doubts that the replacement would feel like the real Leah. Besides, she doesn’t think the real Leah, whose presence in the apartment is often apparent even if it isn’t corporeal, would take kindly to being replaced. She keeps finding scratches on her arms and legs and, most alarmingly, on the part of her back that she herself can’t reach. Leah has always had a habit of climbing into Ronan’s bed to comfort her when she’s having bad dreams and Ronan thinks she must be doing it still, only now she can’t seem to figure out how to do it gently.

Sometimes Gansey or Eve will knock at her door, but they stop trying after a couple attempts to talk to her result in Ronan opening the door only wide enough to speak through it and responding in monosyllables. Ronan can’t understand how they seem to be functioning so well. She doesn’t understand why they would want to talk to her.

She’s lost track of time, so she doesn’t know how many days of school she’s missed or how long it’s been since she’s spoken to her friends on the day that Declan arrives. She hears his voice outside shouting for Gansey and scrambles out of bed, nearly pouring whiskey all over the mattress. Catching the bottle just in time, she sits for a moment to let her spinning head settle before she crawls over to the door to listen to the ensuing conversation. 

“Declan. Hi,” Eve’s voice is even in the face of Declan’s bluster.

“Where’s Gansey?”

“Not here.”

Declan’s voice is irritated and entirely lacking any pretense of politeness when he says, “Oh, come on.” 

Eve apparently doesn’t feel like starting a fight because she replies simply, “She went home for her mother’s birthday.”

“Where’s my sister?”

“Not here,” Eve says, and Ronan loves her for it. 

“Now you are lying.”

“Yeah. I am.” There’s movement in the apartment, Declan’s footsteps coming toward Ronan’s room, but Eve apparently blocks him because the sound stops abruptly. “Now’s really not a good time. And Gansey said it wasn’t a good idea for you two to talk without her around. I think she’s right.” A pause. “You’re not going to fight me, are you?” Ronan thinks Declan must have made some action to threaten Eve for her to say that, and she wants to kill him. “I thought that was Ronan’s things, not yours.” 

“She’s getting kicked out.” Ronan’s heart skips a beat when she hears that, and she only half-registers what Declan says as he continues to speak. “Gansey promised me she would turn her grades around. Well, that hasn’t happened. I trusted Gansey, and she let me down. When she gets back, let her know she’s gotten my sister kicked out.” She knows what this means. Declan has always told her that she can live with Gansey on the condition that she makes it through Aglionby. It’s a large part of what keeps her from dropping out. If she’s been expelled, Declan will try to make her move out of Monmouth, and she can’t imagine an ending to that scenario that doesn’t end with her killing either her brother or herself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Lena & Angie for proofing!
> 
> Tumblr for this project: lady-trc  
> My fandom tumblr: psychotic-adam-parrish


	18. Chapter 18

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The thing is, she’s never wanted Aglionby. She’s never wanted a fancy prep school or the Ivy League colleges it paves the way for. If she had the choice, if she really had the choice, she would have left long ago. But she’s a minor and Declan has the say over where she lives and if he won’t let her live with Gansey, she doesn’t know what she’ll do, but she knows it won’t end well. She doesn’t want to die, but there are lives she isn’t willing to live.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hiatus will start after March 4 and end on May 2 (unless I'm too devastated by trk to write)

“She’s getting kicked out. Gansey promised me she would turn her grades around. Well, that hasn’t happened. I trusted Gansey, and she let me down. When she gets back, let her know she’s gotten my sister kicked out.”

“Oh no,” Eve says. “Ronan did that all by herself. I don’t know when you both are going to see that only Ronan can keep herself in Aglionby. Some day, she has to pick for herself. Until then, you’re both wasting your time. I’ll make sure this gets to her.” He must have brought the letter from the school, Ronan thinks.

Ronan knows she deserves it but sitting here, drunk and miserable and hearing Eve say it out loud makes her want to blink out of existence. The thing is, she’s never wanted Aglionby. She’s never wanted a fancy prep school or the Ivy League colleges it paves the way for. If she had the choice, if she really had the choice, she would have left long ago. But she’s a minor and Declan has the say over where she lives and if he won’t let her live with Gansey, she doesn’t know what she’ll do, but she knows it won’t end well. She doesn’t want to die, but there are lives she isn’t willing to live. 

“She’s moving out. Remind Gansey of that. No Aglionby, no Monmouth.” She’d already known it already, but hearing it hurts more than she’d imagined. Lying down on the floor, she curls up very tightly and tries not to hyperventilate. Chainsaw cries gently from her corner of the room.

“I’ll tell her.”

She can hear Declan’s footsteps again, this time moving away from her. The apartment door opens and closes and he’s gone. Ronan wishes his absence could make her feel as good now as it usually does. 

“Gansey?” It’s Eve voice again, and it takes Ronan a moment to realize she must be talking on the phone. Scrambling back into a sitting position, Ronan presses her ear once more to the door.

“It’s Eve. Declan just came by. Ronan’s been expelled.” There’s a pause. Masochistically, Ronan wishes she could hear Gansey’s end of the conversation. “I’m not sure it can be fixed this time. I thought maybe you could talk Declan into letting her stay. He might be easier to convince than the Aglionby admins.” Ronan grins darkly. Eve doesn’t know her brother. Gansey is probably telling her just that, because Eve says, “You really don’t think he’d let her stay if you told him that she’d probably -- okay. Okay, if you think you can fix it with the school, give it a try. Sooner rather than later, I think. The letter says she shouldn’t come to class on Monday. Not that she was going to anyway.” 

The phone call ends and there’s silence in the apartment again. Ronan lies down and stares up at the ceiling. Her head is swimming with alcohol and grief and fear. She feels sick to her stomach and she isn’t sure if it’s because of what she’d just heard or just a product of a steady diet of whiskey and not much else. She needs to sober up. She needs a shower and a meal and a fresh set of clothes. She needs to look respectable and repentant when Gansey gets back, because chances are, Gansey will come back to tell Ronan that she owes her an enormous favor. Standing unsteadily, she knocks around her room until she finds a water bottle and drinks everything in it. Wiping her mouth, she opens her door to see Eve sitting at Gansey’s desk and studying. At the sound of the door opening, she turns in her seat.

When she sees Ronan in the doorway, she raises an eyebrow. “You done?”

Ronan nods. “I’m done.” 

She goes into the bathroom and takes the hottest shower of her life, like she could scorch the griminess of the past week out of her skin. Back in her room, Ronan drinks more water and gets dressed before bracing herself to join the world again. She doesn’t expect Eve to be particularly sociable, but talking to anyone at all will be a bit of an adjustment, though she realizes with a little surprise that she’s actually missed being around people. Or at least, being around Gansey and Eve and Blue. And Leah. 

She goes out into the main room of the apartment and sits on the couch. Eve greets her with a nod before returning to her homework and Ronan remains curled up there awkwardly, wishing she had something to say. After a while, there’s a knock on the door and Ronan scrambles up to answer it. It’s Blue, looking uncomfortable as he picks at the hem of his paint-splattered tshirt. 

“You guys weren’t waiting outside. I thought maybe you weren’t here.”

“Gansey’s partying with her mother,” Ronan replies. Then, before she can stop herself, she goes on. “And Leah’s fucking dead. But Parrish is here.”

“Ronan, let him in,” Eve says, abandoning her homework and coming to stand by Ronan at the door. “Hey, Blue,” she says, her voice oddly light and breathless. “You’ve never been up here before, have you?”

“Yeah. Should I not --”

“No, come --” Eve says, shoving Ronan a little to get her to open the door wider and leave enough room for Blue to come in. He steps in and looks around the cavernous space with an expression of wonder. Ronan thinks he’s not exactly more easily impressed than most, he just doesn’t try to hide it in order to look cool. 

“What’s the downstairs look like?” He asks eventually.

“Dust,” Eve says. Ronan remembers the sneezing fit Eve had had during their one and only extended trip to the first floor of Monmouth when Gansey had been trying to chase a raccoon out of the building. “And concrete. And more dust. And dirt.” 

“Also, dust,” Ronan says, just to have something to say. Not talking to anyone for a week has taken its toll on her already subpar social skills. She checks the time on her phone and turns to head back to her room. “I have to feed Chainsaw.”

In her room, she puts her headphones on. She doesn’t want to overhear Eve’s conversation with Blue. It’s nice to be alone with Chainsaw for a little bit. Being around Eve had made her realize how lonely she’s been, but she feels awkward and useless without Gansey there, making her fit. She takes the bird with her when she leaves her room.

Eve and Blue are sitting on the floor, surrounded by artifacts from Gansey’s carefully organized and labelled boxes. She settles herself next to Eve with a small sigh and glances up at Blue. She still hasn’t figured out how she’s supposed to interact with him. She holds Chainsaw out to him. “Do you want to hold him?” She asks. Blue just stares, first at her and then at the small bird cupped in her hands and she begins to pull away, a little embarrassed that she’d asked.

“What are you doing?” He says, blinking. “I want to.” Carefully, Ronan deposits the raven into Blue’s outstretched hands. He looks a little unsettled but nonetheless he strokes his feathers and lifts him up to peer into his beady eyes. “What’s his name?”

“Chainsaw,” Eve says, her voice gently mocking.

“He wants you again,” Blue says as Chainsaw begins to make small noises, his beak cracked wide. He hands the bird back to Ronan and she feels warm and content as she takes him between her hands. With the pad of her thumb resting gently on his head, he quiets. It feels good to have something dependent on her. Something that loves her.

“You look like a super villain with your familiar,” Eve says, and Ronan grins, glancing up at Eve. The image suits her, she thinks.

When she hears the sound of Leah’s door opening, Ronan instinctively folds into herself, around Chainsaw. They all turn to see Leah, looking more or less like her usual self, walking over to them. In silence, Blue and Ronan both move closer to Eve to leave room for her and she sits. 

Finally, Eve speaks. “Leah,” she says, and leans over to rub her hand over Leah’s knee. Leah rests her hand gently against Eve’s, pressing it for a moment before she folds both hands in her lap.

“I’m feeling better,” she says, tugging at the sleeves of her hoodie. Ronan remembers the scratches on her body and holds Chainsaw more closely to her chest. Leah leans forward, one elbow propped on her knee, to fiddle with the items from Gansey’s boxes spread between them. She lifts a carved bone to her face, runs it over the dark smudge on her cheek that Ronan now recognizes as a perpetual bruise from the day she died. Seeing it now makes Ronan want to throw up or hit someone. “I want you to know,” Leah goes on, pressing the bone to her throat, “I was...more...when I was alive.” She speaks quietly and she has her head tilted down, letting her hair hide her face the way she does when she’s upset, but her words seem to fill the whole huge space of the apartment. Ronan thinks of the times when Leah is most there, when they’re messing with the BMW or playing ill-advised games of tag in the Nino’s parking lot or talking in the middle of the night after one of Ronan’s nightmares. She imagines Leah like that, but all the time, and amplified. It makes a dull ache in her chest that she wishes she could express to Leah.

“You’re enough now,” Blue says, but Ronan thinks he, too, must be thinking of how Leah seems to flicker in and out of herself, even when she’s present. “I missed you.”

“Hey, man. All those times you wouldn’t give me notes because you said I should go to my classes. You never went to classes.” It might not be the right thing to say, but at least it’s something. She wishes they’d all stop handling Leah with kid gloves. 

“But you did, didn’t you, Leah?” Blue says, leaning toward her, trying to see through the curtain of her hair to her face. “You were an Aglionby student.”

“Are,” Leah says.

“Were. You don’t go to classes,” Ronan insists.

“Neither do you,” Leah says, eyes twitching toward her.

“And she’s about to be a were, too,” Eve says, looking daggers at Ronan.

“Okay!” Blue shouts the word, his usual even-temperedness abandoned, either because the girls are arguing or because Leah is using enough of his energy to start to wear him down. “The police said you’d been missing seven years. Does that seem right?”

“I don’t...I can’t…” Leah knows when she died, Ronan is certain, because of how she always used to introduce herself, but now she seems bewildered and Ronan realizes with a stab of sadness that Leah is fading. 

Blue offers her his hand. “Take it. When I’m at readings with my mom, and she needs to get focused, she holds my hand. Maybe it will help.” 

Leah takes his hand and her presence seems to become more solid. She closes her eyes and shakes her hair away from her face and breathes out the word, “God.” Then, gripping Blue’s hand tight, “I can remember my grades, the date on them -- seven years ago.”

“The same year Gansey was stung by hornets,” Eve says quietly, like she only wants Ronan to hear.

“Coincidence,” Ronan says, knowing that it isn’t. She remembers what Gansey had told her about that night, the voice telling her the would live when she should not because someone somewhere else on the ley line was dying when they should not. It had been Leah. Ronan doesn’t know how to make peace with the fact that Gansey is alive because Leah is dead. She imagines Leah fully alive, fully present. She imagines Gansey buried in the dark Virginia soil. With effort, she doesn’t think about whether or not it’s a trade she’d be willing to make.

“It was supposed to do something to the ley line. I don’t remember what she said it was supposed to do.” So Leah had known her murderer. It’s getting harder and harder for Ronan not to be angry. 

“Wake it up,” Eve says.

“Yeah, that. I didn’t care. It was always her deal, and I was just going along with her because it was something to do. I didn’t know she was going to…” A friend, Ronan thinks, and the anger in her surges again like acid, eating at her insides. 

“This is the ritual Gansey was talking about. Someone did try it,” Eve says, turning to Ronan. Ronan wishes she didn’t sound excited about the discovery. Ronan doesn’t generally care about things being in bad taste, but Eve’s intellectual interest in the supernatural purposes of their friend’s death certainly seems to qualify. “With a sacrifice as the symbolic way to touch the ley line.” She turns back to Leah. “You were the sacrifice, weren’t you, Leah? Someone killed you for this.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Lena & Angie for proofing!
> 
> Tumblr for this project: lady-trc  
> My fandom tumblr: psychotic-adam-parrish


	19. Chapter 19

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She wishes there were some way to spare Leah the pain of remembering, but Ronan can never change the essence of herself and because her friend is dead, it is necessary for her to find revenge. She wishes sometimes that her rage didn’t outstrip her grief, but it always, always does.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for some gory moments & PTSD stuff
> 
> Also, miraclepigeon on tumblr has made awesome art of the girls! Check them out:
> 
>  
> 
> [Ronan](http://psychotic-adam-parrish.tumblr.com/post/139522902356/can-you-see-the-fanart-alright-im-unsure-if-it)
> 
>  
> 
> [Leah](http://psychotic-adam-parrish.tumblr.com/post/139586362846/i-was-almost-done-drawing-leah-by-the-time-you)
> 
>  
> 
> [Gansey](http://psychotic-adam-parrish.tumblr.com/post/139762713961/gansey-d-this-is-perfect-oh-my-gosh)
> 
>  
> 
> [Eve](http://psychotic-adam-parrish.tumblr.com/post/139823798376/eve-parrish-shes-so-dreamy)

The way Leah turns her face away from Eve is enough answer for her question. It takes a moment for Ronan to realize she is hiding the smudge on her cheek. She wonders now why she never questioned its constant presence, a bruise that should have faded seven years ago but never did. The possibility that there are more bruises out of view under her clothes or her hair occurs to Ronan and her anger presses harder and harder at the back of her throat, begging for release. 

Staring at the floor, Leah says. “My face...I can’t remember when I stopped being alive.” Ronan can imagine it, because imagining violence is what she does with most of her time. The force it would take to hit someone’s face hard enough to shatter the bone underneath. She closes her eyes briefly to try to block out the image, and focuses on what Eve had been saying. It had been a sacrifice to wake the ley line. Leah had been sacrificed. “But it didn’t work,” she says, watching Leah’s averted eyes.

“I almost woke up Cabeswater. We were close enough to do that. It wasn’t for nothing.” Her voice shifts, becoming as close to fierce as Ronan has ever heard her. “But I’m glad she never found that. She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know where it is.” Ronan is glad too. Cabeswater is special, holy, private. She doesn’t want a killer there.

She grits her teeth. She wishes there were some way to spare Leah the pain of remembering, but Ronan can never change the essence of herself and because her friend is dead, it is necessary for her to find revenge. She wishes sometimes that her rage didn’t outstrip her grief, but it always, always does. “Okay, it’s time to stop fucking around. Who did it, Leah. Seriously, man. Spill it.” As she speaks, the anger is building and building and somewhere in the midst of wanting to destroy whoever killed Leah, she’s also getting mad at Leah herself because somehow, impossibly, Leah still wants to protect this person. Ronan is about as loyal as they come, but a key part of that is that when she chooses her friends, she chooses people who are worthy of her trust and her faith. People who give loyalty in return. Not people who would sacrifice their friends for some dubious mystical power. “I’m not asking you for notes,” she says, and she realizes that her voice is more threatening than she’d intended it. Sometimes it happens like that, she only realizes how pissed she is when she hears herself speak. “I’m asking who smashed your head in.”

“We were friends,” Leah says, and there’s a bit of desperation in her voice. Ronan wonders what dreadful mixture of shame and love has made Leah protect this woman for seven years. 

“A friend wouldn’t kill you,” Eve says, and she sounds like Ronan. 

Leah finally looks up, glancing between them as she speaks, in search of some hint of sympathy. “You don’t understand,” she says. “She was upset. She’d lost everything. If she’d been thinking straight, I don’t think she would’ve...she didn’t mean to...we were friends like -- are you afraid of Gansey?”  
The comparison makes Ronan want to reach out and slap Leah, which is not an urge she’s ever had before. It scares her a bit, but Leah is talking about Gansey, Gansey her first true friend, her most trusted confidante, her companion through long and sleepless and terrible nights. Gansey her queen. There is no kindness left in her voice when she speaks again. “Come on, Leah. A name. Who killed you.”

Something in Leah’s posture resolves itself and she looks at Ronan. “But you already know.”

It takes Ronan several moments to understand. Someone they already know. Someone who would have been at Aglionby seven years ago, and who had lost everything. Someone with a considerable knowledge of all things ancient. The answer comes into Ronan’s mind just as Eve says, “Did Whelk go to Aglionby?”

The change in Leah’s face is enough confirmation, but Ronan still says, “Yeah, she did. There’s a pennant above her desk. Class of ‘05. Seven years ago.” Blood is humming in Ronan’s ears. A moment of complete silence passes before she stands in a rush and throws herself against one of the large pillars near the center of the room, slamming her fist against it. “That fucking bitch,” she says, more a scream than a sentence. Her whole hand hurts, and her wrist does too. When she looks down at her knuckles, she sees that they’re bleeding. They sting so much that they almost feel numb, the way extremely hot water seems cold to the touch. 

A voice comes from behind her and it takes her a moment to identify the speaker despite the fact that it’s Eve. Her accent is slipping through and something vicious and loving in Ronan leaps at the sound of it. She hits the wall again, the already broken skin of her knuckles singing high and painful at the contact. 

“I’ll fucking kill her,” Ronan says, her voice quieter now but more dangerous. “I will, I’ll fucking kill her, I’ll kill her. That creepy weirdo fuckhead murderer --”

“Ronan,” Eve’s voice comes again, and it’s hard and firm in the way that Ronan usually associates with Gansey. Ronan turns to see Leah with her knees pulled up to her chest, huddling against Blue. She looks like she’s about to cry or disappear. 

“Fuck,” Ronan says, coming back to the circle and dropping to her knees between Eve and Leah. She flexes her hand and is grateful for how much it hurts. 

“So what do we do,” Eve asks, looking between Ronan and Leah. 

“We go to her house and we bash her fucking head in,” Ronan says, her voice free of passion. 

“Ronan,” Eve says again, looking at Ronan with one eyebrow raised. “No. You’re not a killer.” 

And it’s true. When it comes down to it, Ronan doesn’t want to kill Whelk. She just wants to hurt her very, very badly and then take her to the police. Ronan may be brutal, but she’s not actually bloodthirsty. “Fine. We go to the police.”

“Do we have any evidence? I don’t think they’ll allow the testimony of the ghosts of murder victims.”

Ronan shrugs. “She did it. Leah’s body is with the police now, they know where it happened, people must have known that she and Leah were friends. Someone must know they went out together that night.”

“Ronan, it was seven years ago,” Eve says, ever practical. “They’re going to have a hell of a time digging up people who can remember where Whelk was on some random night seven years ago.”

“It wasn’t random,” Ronan says, voice low. “It was the night Leah died.”

“I just mean in the minds of people who --”

“It wasn’t random!”

Eve is losing patience, Ronan can tell. “Fine. Leah, can you think of any evidence that would point to Whelk?”

 

Leah shrinks further against Blue, who has an arm around her. “I’m not sure -- I can’t --”

“Can’t or don’t want to?” Ronan asks.

“Don’t,” Blue says, glaring at her. Ronan understands why. She doesn’t want to hurt Leah, but the idea of Whelk still at Aglionby, still walking free, makes her stomach turn.

“The police have the body,” Eve says. “There must be some physical evidence, right?” But there’s doubt in her eyes as she and Ronan exchange a glance. They both know all that was left was bones, flesh and skin and even the cloth of her uniform decomposed and weathered away after seven years on the forest floor. There’s probably nothing left that could be used in a police investigation. Ronan considers reverting to Plan A: bashing Whelk’s head in. “We’ll figure something out,” Eve continues. “I promise.” She reaches out to pat Leah’s knee as she says this, but Ronan isn’t completely sure that this is what Leah wants. 

Blue shifts away from the group and gets to his feet. “I’m feeling pretty worn down,” he says, smiling shakily down at Leah. “I guess I have a lot of energy but not always enough to go around. Anyway I should be heading home, it’s getting late.” 

Eve gets to her feet. “Do you want me to walk you home?”

“Oh no, that’s okay. I’ll be fine, you should stay. This is important.” 

Eve sits back down, a little awkward. She looks a bit disappointed, but Ronan is glad that she isn’t going anywhere. She’d never admit it, but truth be told she doesn’t like the idea of being alone with Leah right now. Her hand goes instinctively to the scratches along her arm. She hopes Leah doesn’t notice. “We’ll see you tomorrow then,” Eve says, and waves goodbye as Blue leaves, then focuses her attention back on Leah. “How are you feeling?”

“I’m okay,” she says, but she doesn’t look it.

“We don’t have to deal with this right now,” Eve says, settling a hand on top of Leah’s. 

Leah tilts her head and it’s more eerie than it should be. “You’re going to have to,” she says and for a moment Ronan frowns, confused. Then her phone starts ringing in her pocket at Leah makes a surprised “Oh!” And pops out of existence. 

“Leah, you fucking --” Ronan breaks off in the middle of her sentence when she sees the name on the screen of her phone. It’s the Henrietta hospital. She answers. “Hello?”

It’s Gansey’s voice on the other end of the line, and she sounds energized and frightened and full of chaos. “Ronan? It’s me. Whelk was the one who killed Leah and she just tried to kill me and I need you to meet me at the hospital, I’ve broken my thumb.”

“Gansey what the fuck, slow down, what happened? And we know about Whelk and Leah.”

“How do you -- never mind, we’ll talk about it later. The Pig stopped and I was pulled over by the side of the road and she pulled up and made me give her the journal and said -- I’ll explain at the hospital, but she had a gun, I can’t fucking believe I’m alive, I mean -- god, I’m alive.” 

Ronan thinks all the blood in her body must go cold for a moment at the thought of Gansey in danger, Gansey with a gun in her face, and Ronan not there. 

“Listen, I’ve got to go, I’m calling from a hospital phone, Whelk took my cell. I fucking punched the gun out of her hand but I forgot keep my thumb outside my fist.”

“Gansey, you fucking idiot.”

“I think you mean, Gansey I’m so glad you’re not dead.”

“Yeah. Yeah, that’s what I meant,” Ronan says, a little softer.

“Is Eve there? Bring Eve with you. We need to talk. I’ve told the police what I know. We need to go to 300 Fox Way. You were right, Ronan. It’s starting. Good god, man, my thumb hurts. Okay, I have to go. Come as soon as you can.” And she hangs up.

“What was that?” Eve asks. 

“I don’t --” Ronan says, staring at her phone. “We have to go to the hospital, Gansey’s there.”

“Is she hurt?” Eve asks, a little panicked. 

“She just broke her thumb because she threw a punch with it in her fist like the fucking idiot she is, she’ll be okay. She --” Ronan doesn’t know how to bring herself to say the next part, it’s still too terrifying for her mind to settle on it. “She almost died. Whelk found her by the side of the road and there was a gun and -- she’s just got a broken thumb but she could have --” And Ronan is thinking about her mother, shattered remains of bone and blood where a face should have been, her arms twisted in all the wrong ways, red across her favorite white button down with the sleeves rolled up. Trying to steady her breaths, she looks around Monmouth telling herself that she is here and now but she can also taste the gravel of the driveway back home in her mouth, feel her throat raw from screaming, her mother’s still warm skin under her hand. She blinks and she can see Gansey bleeding out on the side of the highway, the last twitch of muscles responding to some electrical impulse rather than thought. 

Eve takes her hand and that’s good, that real and here and now and the bone of her wrist is real and so is the way the skin dips just below it and so is the faint but steady beating of her pulse in her palm. “Ronan? Are you okay?”

“I’m --” She looks up at Eve, aware that she must look strange in this moment. It feels like she’s looking at Eve in microscopic detail, taking inventory of each blonde hair in her left eyebrow then turning her attention to the freckles on her nose. She thinks, snap out of it, Lynch. “I’m fine. We have to go. I’ll go grab my keys.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Lena & Angie for proofing!
> 
> Tumblr for this project: lady-trc  
> My fandom tumblr: psychotic-adam-parrish


	20. Chapter 20

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The two of them sit together on a sofa in the lobby, Eve staring straight ahead, Ronan picking at the tacky plastic surface of the seat and checking her watch obsessively. When Gansey finally comes out, Ronan is instantly on her feet and throwing herself at her friend. All the tension goes out of her when Gansey’s arms come around her to hug her back. Gansey is warm and alive and laughing a little in her ear, saying, “Christ, Ronan, I didn’t hurt myself that badly.” Ronan steps back to look at her, and really she does seem to be alright, despite the fact that she’d almost gotten herself killed. Her thumb is in a splint and she’s wearing her wire-frame glasses, something Ronan associates with her private, nighttime Gansey. Pulling her close to hug her again, she says very quietly, so only Gansey will hear, “I’m so glad you’re alive.” She feels Gansey’s grip on her tighten for a moment before she lets her go to hug Eve.

They’re out of the apartment in under two minutes, Ronan nearly tripping down the stairs in her haste to get to the car. She knows it’s probably a bad idea for her to get behind the wheel in her current state of mind, but she doesn’t care, she wants to be driving. Eve hasn’t even closed her door when Ronan starts backing out, and she speeds more than usual on the way to the hospital. She pulls into a parking place and slams on the break, jerking them both forward toward the dashboard. Eve winces at the way the seat belt cuts into her chest, but she doesn’t comment on it. Then they’re both scrambling out of the car and hurrying up the steps to the front doors. At the reception desk, Ronan can’t figure out how to explain herself.

“Gansey. We’re here for Gansey, where is she?”

Eve is a more articulate. “Our friend, Robin Gansey is here, she’s probably just recently been admitted. Can we visit her?”

The receptionist looks at them over her glasses. “Are you family?”

“No, we’re just friends.”

“You’ll have to wait, then.”

It takes a great deal of restraint for Ronan not to slam her fist against the counter. “No, we have to see her, we have to, it’s Gansey --”

Eve puts a hand on her arm. “Ronan. She didn’t die. She isn’t going to die. She just hurt her thumb.”

Ronan takes a few steadying breaths and nods. “Yeah. Yeah, okay. We’ll wait.”

The two of them sit together on a sofa in the lobby, Eve staring straight ahead, Ronan picking at the tacky plastic surface of the seat and checking her watch obsessively. When Gansey finally comes out, Ronan is instantly on her feet and throwing herself at her friend. All the tension goes out of her when Gansey’s arms come around her to hug her back. Gansey is warm and alive and laughing a little in her ear, saying, “Christ, Ronan, I didn’t hurt myself that badly.” Ronan steps back to look at her, and really she does seem to be alright, despite the fact that she’d almost gotten herself killed. Her thumb is in a splint and she’s wearing her wire-frame glasses, something Ronan associates with her private, nighttime Gansey. Pulling her close to hug her again, she says very quietly, so only Gansey will hear, “I’m so glad you’re alive.” She feels Gansey’s grip on her tighten for a moment before she lets her go to hug Eve. 

“Glad you made it back in one piece,” Eve says, squeezing Gansey’s shoulder. 

“Me too. Thank god Ronan taught me how to fight.”

“And I thought I taught you to keep your thumb outside your fist, you dipshit,” Ronan says. “So what the fuck happened?” 

Gansey glances around the lobby. “Not here,” she says, and directs them out into the cool night air where they stand together next to the BMW. “A nurse called the police for me and they showed up after the doctor set my thumb. Apparently Whelk is gone, packed her bags and left. They’re looking for her, though.” Ronan thinks Gansey must have seen the way she’d tensed up because she rests a steadying hand on her shoulder. “I was just driving back and the Pig stopped, you know how it does. And Whelk turns up and sticks a gun in my face and demands I give her my phone and my journal. And she said -- she said the police had called Aglionby. About Leah. And now she’s screwed, because of me. She doesn’t just want to find the ley line now, she needs to. She thinks it’s the only thing that will save her from life in prison.”

“And you gave her everything?” Eve asks.

“I had to, she was going to kill me.”

“Wait,” Ronan says, frowning. “You said you had to punch the gun out of her hand. But you gave her what she wanted?”

Gansey’s eyes are strange and distant, and it reminds Ronan of how she’d looked that night with the wasp. “I did. I gave her what she wanted but she had -- she had the gun right in my face. The barrel against my forehead.” Ronan wishes she could stop picturing it, wishes she could stop imagining Gansey on the ground, eyes open and glazed, a hole in her head. “And the way she was looking at me. Like I wasn’t even human. Like I was the reason her life is going to shit. She didn’t care that I’d given her what she’d asked for, she just wanted to kill me for the sake of killing me.” 

Ronan doesn’t know what to say, and she’s too screwed up by all of this to care how it looks so she pulls Gansey into another hug and says, “I wouldn’t have let her.” Gansey has the good sense not to say something like “you couldn’t have” or “you weren’t even there.” Instead, she squeezes the back of Ronan’s neck and says, “You didn’t. You’re the one that saved me, you know. You’re the one who taught me to throw a hook. I don’t know what I would have done without that.” Ronan presses her face into the curve of Gansey’s neck and breathes deeply before stepping back. 

“Thank God for me,” she says, and Gansey purses her lips but there’s a smile somewhere underneath it.

“I called Blue,” Gansey says. “To tell him what happened. Turns out he found some information about Whelk after he left you guys at Monmouth this afternoon. He wants us to come over so we can all talk about what we know. His aunt or someone had been in contact with Whelk, trying to learn more about the ley line. So we’re going to Fox Way, we’re going to find out what they know and tell them what we know, and we’re going to stop Whelk from waking the line. We need to stay ahead of her.” 

This, Ronan thinks, is all Gansey needs to steady her. A plan, preferably with multiple steps that can be labelled a, b, c. But Ronan still feels unmoored. She wants to hold onto Gansey, to sit with her the way she sits with Chainsaw and just take time to be grateful for her undeniable aliveness, the steady beating of her heart, her breath, the movement of her limbs. But she’s walking away from them in the parking lot, toward the Camaro, and Ronan has to resist the urge to follow after her like a dog after its mistress. Gansey turns as she unlocks the door of the Camaro. “I’ll meet you there,” she says, and gets in the car. Ronan only realizes how long she’s been standing still and watching Gansey, one hand on the latch of the door of the BMW when Eve says softly, “She’ll be okay, Ronan. We should get going.”

Ronan nods and they get in and Ronan follows Gansey to Fox Way. This time she drives at the speed limit. When they arrive at the house, Eve grabs her hand before she can get out of the car. “You’re not gonna freak out in front of the psychics?” She asks.

Ronan rolls her eyes, though she knows Eve has good reasons to be worried. After all, the last time she’d been here she’d had a panic attack on the front porch. “I’m fine,” she says, and goes to meet Gansey on the sidewalk. Together, the three of them walk up the steps and Gansey knocks on the door. It’s a strange moment of deja vu as Ronan remembers the last time they were here. Everything has changed since then. Blue is their friend, they’ve found Cabeswater, they’ve learned that Leah is dead. It had been such a short time ago, but the Ronan of that first visit seems so simple to her now. 

Again, Maura is the one who opens the door. “Gansey,” she says. “Blue told me to expect you.”

“We need to talk, ma’am,” she says, and Maura opens the door wider for them to come in. In the hallway, Ronan notices Gansey glancing up at the staircase where Blue had come down on their first visit.

“So Blue tells me,” she says. “This doesn’t seem like a conversation we should be having in the front hall. Come into the kitchen. Blue is there, and so is my half-sister, Neeve. She’s the one Blue told you about. This woman, Whelk, wanted her help locating the corpse road. What you call the ley line,” she says this as she leads them into a small kitchen, where Blue is sitting on the counter eating yogurt. He hops down when they enter. “Gansey,” he says, bracing himself against the counter. “Are you okay? Over the phone you sounded --”

“I’m fine,” she says, giving him a small smile that Ronan wishes didn’t make her jealous. The two other women from the reading are there, as well as a fourth. 

The ethereal one, Persephone, puts down her knitting. “They’re here to talk about something serious,” she says. “I’ll make tea.”

“I can help,” Eve says, stepping forward. Ronan wonders how much of this is her deeply ingrained politeness and how much of it is her desire to be doing something with her hands, something useful.

“This is Neeve,” Maura says, gesturing to the fourth woman, who is sitting at the table. “These are Blue’s friends, the Aglionby girls.” 

Neeve eyes them. “You’re right about them,” is her only comment. Ronan shoves her hands deeper in her pockets. She hates the mysteriousness of everyone in this house. It’s not exactly that she thinks they’re being dishonest, it’s just that they’re infuriatingly unstraightforward, and to Ronan there’s very little difference between those two things. It’s the exclusivity of it that bothers her, how many of their statements are incomprehensible to anyone not in Club Psychic. She wonders if Blue finds it upsetting. She can see the irony of her, an Aglionby girl, being bothered by exclusivity, but in truth she’s used to being outside, apart. It’s not like there are many out lesbians at a Virginian all-girls boarding school. She’s used to being on the periphery. It’s only with Gansey that she isn’t. 

As Persephone and Eve move around the kitchen making tea, Maura turns to Gansey. “So. You have some information about this woman who is so eager to learn about the corpse road. Would you like to tell me more?”

“Blue already knows some of this,” Gansey says, settling herself at the table across from Neeve. Ronan remains standing, unable to keep still, at first just knocking her foot against the doorframe, then beginning to pace up and down the length of the small kitchen. “She’s our Latin teacher, oddly enough,” Gansey goes on. “I was driving home from my parent’s house in D.C. when my car stopped, so I was by the side of the road. She pulled over and I thought she was going to offer me a ride or help out or do -- I don’t know, but she asked me for my cell phone and my journal, the one I keep all my findings about the ley line and Glyndower in -- you know about Glyndower?”

Maura nods tersely. “Blue has told us a little.” 

“Well, she asked me for the journal and made me tell her where I’d been exploring. Where Cabeswater is. You know about Cabeswater?” Another nod. “She had a gun and I’m pretty sure she was going to shoot, so I punched her hand, which is how I ended up with a broken thumb. And basically she told me that she was the one who killed Leah. You know about Leah?” A third nod. 

“And Blue says he -- and these two --” Maura indicates Eve and Ronan, “Already knew about who killed Leah.”  
“Yeah,” Eve says turning from her task. “Leah told us. Or. Didn’t exactly tell us, but we figured it out. We were planning on talking to the police, seeing if we could help them make the connection, but apparently Whelk got spooked when the cops called the school to ask about Leah’s disappearance. We didn’t actually have anything solid on her, but she’s incriminated herself pretty thoroughly.”

“How considerate of her,” Calla says. She’s been standing in the corner, silent until now. “Neeve, would you like to explain to Maura what you were doing with this Whelk character?”

“She asked me to investigate the corpse road, find a place near Henrietta that has special powers associated with it. I told her no and we haven’t spoken since. I came here on my own terms.”

“Alright,” Maura says, leaning back against the doorframe. “Let’s see if we can figure out what’s going on here.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Lena & Angie for proofing!
> 
> Tumblr for this project: lady-trc  
> My fandom tumblr: psychotic-adam-parrish


	21. Chapter 21

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They’re talking about Blue’s father, and she doesn’t really care about that. Besides, it seems like a private, family-only kind of conversation, and Ronan feels a little strange about being there to witness it. Instead, she watches Gansey’s thumb, the only physical evidence of her encounter with Whelk. She wishes, illogically, that she could have set it herself. All the times Gansey has taken care of her after fights, wrapped her bruised and bleeding knuckles, pressed ice to black eyes, covered skinned knees with bandaids, and she can do nothing in return. She hadn’t even managed to properly teach Gansey how to throw a hook, though apparently she’d retained enough to save her life.

Sitting at the kitchen table, Gansey picks at her wrist.“Could someone cut this hospital bracelet off? I feel like an invalid. Please.”

Persephone moves away from the tea-making operation to hand Gansey a pair of scissors. “Blue, I did tell you about putting your thumb outside your fist if you were going to hit someone.” 

“You didn’t tell me to tell her,” Blue says in protest. Ronan had told her, but she doesn’t say that, just keeps pacing. She doesn’t know what to do with the directionless adrenaline that comes from the knowledge that Gansey might have died tonight, or with the creeping fear of knowing that Whelk is still out there and still wants to find the line and still wants to hurt them. A little bit of her distress is eased by Gansey carefully clipping off her tag from the hospital and stuffing it into her pocket. A little less evidence of the disasters of this night. 

“Okay, there are a few things going on here, obviously,” Maura says, looking at Gansey. “Someone just tried to kill you. You two,” she continues, glancing between Eve and Ronan, “are telling me that your friend was killed by the woman who just tried to kill her. You three,” she says, pointing to Calla, Persephone and Blue who are all standing together by the counter, “are telling me that Neeve had a phone call with the woman who killed your friend and just now tried to kill Gansey. And you’re telling me that you’ve had nothing to do with him since that phone call.” The last part is directed at Neeve, who seems profoundly free of remorse. 

She also doesn’t seem to have very much information about Whelk, so after a moment Ronan zones out. They’re talking about Blue’s father, and she doesn’t really care about that. Besides, it seems like a private, family-only kind of conversation, and Ronan feels a little strange about being there to witness it. Instead, she watches Gansey’s thumb, the only physical evidence of her encounter with Whelk. She wishes, illogically, that she could have set it herself. All the times Gansey has taken care of her after fights, wrapped her bruised and bleeding knuckles, pressed ice to black eyes, covered skinned knees with bandaids, and she can do nothing in return. She hadn’t even managed to properly teach Gansey how to throw a hook, though apparently she’d retained enough to save her life. That’s a train of thought that’s likely to send Ronan spiralling again, though, so she shifts her attention to Eve, who is leaning against the counter with the teapot behind her. Ronan follows her gaze to Blue, and his gaze to Gansey, and she jerks away from them because she doesn’t want to see, not really. 

Her attention refocuses when Gansey speaks. “You didn’t tell me. At the reading, when I asked about the ley line, you withheld information from me.” Her voice is soft, but there’s a hurt there. Gansey has always hated being lied to.

“How was I supposed to know what you would do with it? So, where is this woman now? Whelk?”

“Barra Whelk,” Ronan and Eve both say, and they share a glance across the kitchen. Gansey repeats what she’s already told the two of them about talking to the police at the hospital, that Whelk’s current whereabouts are unknown. 

“I believe she’s what you call on the lam,” Ronan says, fiddling with a decorative cup on a shelf next to her. Eve shoots her a pointed luck and she puts it down. 

“Do you think she still has interest in you?” Maura asks Gansey. 

Ronan is oddly relieved to see Gansey shake her head, as though somewhere in her gut she had been convinced until that moment that Whelk was going to come back specifically for Gansey, to take her away from them. “I don’t know know if she ever cared about me. I don’t think she had a plan. She wants the journal. She wants Glyndower.” 

“But she doesn’t know where Glyndower is?”

“No one does. I have a colleague --” this makes Ronan snort. It’s one of the things she’s always found hilarious if oddly charming about Gansey, the way she speaks of herself as a true scholar rather than a weird, obsessive high schooler on the hunt for a magical dead queen. Then again, Ronan thinks, Gansey rarely seems truly young. At any rate, she ignores Ronan and continues. “A colleague in the UK who told me about the ritual that Whelk used Leah for. It’s possible she’ll try it again in a different place. Like Cabeswater.” Ronan is a little less frightened by this idea now that she knows Gansey isn’t worried about Whelk coming after them. She makes it a general rule in life not to worry about anything that even Gansey doesn’t think is worth worrying about.

After a pause, Neeve speaks. “I think we should wake it up.” Ronan turns to look at her, and so does everyone else in the kitchen.

“Excuse me? I’m pretty sure I heard it involved a dead body,” Calla says, and Ronan thinks yes, despite what Calla had said to her on their first visit, this is the one she likes.

“Not necessarily,” Neeve replies, her tone still even. “A sacrifice isn’t always death.”

The hair at the back of Ronan’s neck prickles. True, a sacrifice isn’t always death, but it is always the loss of something. She thinks of her father, silent since the day her mother died, kept alive by a home nurse, enshrined in a house that Ronan will never be allowed to return to. She thinks of Declan, the tenuous love between them damaged beyond repair after their fight over what to do about the will. Though she doesn’t know what exactly waking the ley line will mean, whom it might benefit or even if it could lead them to Glyndower, she isn’t sure that any sort of sacrifice is worth it. The thing about loss, even if it doesn’t involve a body count, is that it is by definition irreversible. Nothing that they give to the ley line will be given back, and it’s a permanence that doesn’t sit well with Ronan. She doesn’t want to give up anything more, and she doesn’t want to watch her friends give up anything either. 

Gansey is getting anxious too, Ronan can tell. She’s running her thumb repeatedly and rapidly over her bottom lip, her stim that Ronan most associates with distress. “Even assuming that is true, Cabeswater is a bit of a strange place. What would the rest of the ley line be like if we woke it up?”

“I’m not sure,” Neeve says, taking the cup of tea that Persephone hands her. “I can tell you right now that it will be woken, though. I don’t even need my scrying bowl to see that. Do you disagree?” The question is directed at Persephone, who is trying in vain to hide from the conversation behind her mug, but she acknowledges her agreement with Neeve. 

“And I do not think you want it to be Ms. Whelk. Whoever wakes up the corpse road will be favored by the corpse road. Both the one who sacrifices and the one who is sacrificed.”

“Favored like Leah is favored?” Gansey asks, and Ronan think they’re both remembering the night they’d found out she was dead, how scared and miserable she’d seemed. “She doesn’t seem very lucky.”

“From what I’ve heard here, she was living a physical life in an apartment with these girls,” Neeve points out. “That seems far preferable to a traditional spirit’s existence. I would count that as favorable.” It occurs to Ronan that she has no idea what the life of a “traditional spirit” is. She wonders if it’s the same as when Leah flickers out of sight. Leah has never talked to them about where she goes or what it’s like, and while she hadn’t dedicated much thought to it before now, Ronan suddenly wants to know what it’s like for her, if only because she feels like if she knows, maybe she could protect her.

Gansey starts talking about Leah’s connection to the ley line, the inherent instability of it, and Ronan has to agree that any favor they might gain from ley line will likely have a similar quality. When she suggests telling the police about Cabeswater, the reaction of the women in the kitchen is loud and violent.

“NO,” Maura and Neeve say at once, Neeve actually standing up and putting her hands on the table, leaning across it toward Gansey, who looks like she’s doing her best not to seem intimidated. She’s actually pulling it off for everyone except Ronan, but Ronan will always know when Gansey is scared.

“I thought you went to Cabeswater,” Neeve says, glaring at Gansey.

“We did.”

“Didn’t you feel that place? Do you want it destroyed? How many people do you want tramping through it? Does it seem like a place that can exist full of tourists? It’s...holy.”

Ronan squeezes her hand into a fist. Her knuckles still sting from earlier. Holy is the same word she’d thought of.

“What I’d like is to neither send the police to Cabeswater nor wake the ley line. I would like to find out more about Cabeswater, and then I’d like to find Glyndower.” This version of Gansey, too, is familiar to Ronan -- the one who says quietly everything that she wants to have, everything that she wants to be given and essentially shuts down until she’s allowed to have it. It’s not so much that she’s entitled (though she often is) as that she simply runs out of energy. It shouldn’t be surprising, given how she hard she works. 

“What about Whelk?” Maura asks pointedly. 

“I don’t know. I just don’t want to bother with her at all.” Ronan had been right. This is Gansey out of gas.

“Well, she’s not going to just go away because you don’t want to deal with her.”

“I didn’t say it was possible, I just said that it was what I would like.” Gansey puts her head in her hands and just sits there like that for a moment, very still, and draws a deep breath. When she looks up, she’s transformed, calm and in command again. “I’m going back to Cabeswater. She took my journal, but I’m not letting her take Glyndower, too. I’m not going to stop looking just because she’s looking, too. And I’m going to fix Leah. Somehow.”

“I’ll help you,” Blue says, stepping forward. Eve and Ronan just lock eyes across the room and nod. They don’t have to say it -- Gansey knows they’ll be with her every step of the way.

“Right now, though” Gansey says, pushing her chair back and getting up, “I think we all need to get some rest. It’s late and we’re going to have a lot to do tomorrow, and we have school in the morning. We could come back here to discuss things further in the afternoon if that would be alright.” She looks at Maura for approval of this plan, and Maura nods. “Goodnight for now,” she says, nodding to Blue. “Thanks for telling me what you found out about Whelk.”

Blue takes them out to the front door and hugs Gansey and Eve and, after a slight moment of hesitation, Ronan. “You guys take care. Call 911 if Whelk shows up, I don’t want any of you acting heroic.” He tugs at the hem of his shirt. “I’m tired of him hurting my friends.”

Outside, Eve agrees to let Ronan drive her home, and Gansey heads back to Monmouth in the Camaro. “You don’t want to stay the night?” Ronan asks, already knowing the answer.

“No.” 

“I just mean because of Whelk.” Ronan knows that Eve thinks Gansey likes to keep her possessions close, but she hopes that Eve also understands that Ronan wants to keep her friends close because it’s the only way she can protect them. But Eve wants to protect herself, and on some level, Ronan gets that. She’s always been someone who can sustain herself and take care of herself and she takes pride in it because it’s one of the very few things she’s permitted. This is where Gansey is wrong about Eve, though Ronan has never bothered to correct her. Gansey thinks it’s because Eve doesn’t have money, that she wants to prove herself so she can show that it’s possible to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and maybe that’s a small part of it, but Ronan knows Eve better than that. She knows that Eve’s father has never allowed her to make her own choices. Her life is narrowly confined, hemmed in on every side. Ronan can’t understand everything about Eve’s life, but she knows what it’s like to live with the walls closing in. She knows that there are some battles you have to fight yourself. A lot of things are about money, but not everything. Not this. 

“No,” Eve says. “Take me home.” 

And they drive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Lena & Angie for proofing!
> 
> Tumblr for this project: lady-trc  
> My fandom tumblr: psychotic-adam-parrish


	22. Chapter 22

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Her hands grip tight on the steering wheel as Eve gets out. There are too many people she can’t protect. She turns around and starts driving away, willing herself not to look in the rearview mirror, to just go back to Monmouth, to Gansey, to not think about it. If she gets between Eve and her father, it will only make things more complicated.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for: homophobic slurs, violence, abuse, vague reference to police brutality (the last one is a blink and you'll miss it thing). AKA the one where Ronan fights Robert Parrish, so it's a doozy

Ronan hates taking Eve home. It’s almost always Gansey who does it, which means that Ronan has never built up a tolerance for seeing how Eve quietly folds in on herself as they approach the trailer park. She hates that she doesn’t know how to be kind about it. It’s not a flaw that usually bothers her, but it does now. When they’ve arrived, Ronan pulls the emergency brake and watches the dust swirling up behind the car out of the rearview mirror, and says, “The buck stops here. Home shit home.”

“Thanks for the ride,” Eve says, hugging her bag to herself but not making any movement toward the door handle. Ronan turns to look at her and feels the old familiar stab between the ribs. Eve is, as ever, painfully lovely in her blue jeans and her blousy, floral print shirt. Like everything else, this isn’t fair. Ronan follows Eve’s gaze toward the doublewide and sees her parents standing at the window, the small shape of her mother and father, broad and solid in all the ways that Eve isn’t. 

“Man, you don’t have to get out here,” she says. She wonders if it would make a difference if she made it clear that it was her, Ronan, asking for her own sake and not Gansey’s. She wonders if it would make a difference if she got on her knees and begged. 

Eve says, “Don’t you have homework to do?” And Ronan gives up on the thought. 

She grins, her teeth feeling large and vicious and false in her mouth. “Yes, Parrish. I believe I do.” As if she could do any work on a night like this. Eve still doesn’t move and Ronan feels like she’s watching her thought process as she tries to pinpoint the exact moment where the continued comfort of the car and Ronan’s company and the avoidance of her father stop outweighing the increase in her father’s wrath that comes as a product of her lingering. Ronan knows she’s a liability to Eve. She should have let Eve off at the corner but she’d been feeling selfish so she’d kept going. 

The first and only time Gansey had driven her Camaro up to the doublewide while Robert Parrish was around, she’d heard him call herself and Ronan “those queers” before he’d chased her off with the exclamation of, “Scram, you soft rich fucker!” She’d returned to Monmouth considerably shaken to tell Ronan the story. Ronan had found this second insult hilarious, perhaps all the more so because the first was anything but funny. She and Gansey, attached at the hip as they are, get called those queers often enough at Aglionby, often enough that Ronan feels like the sting of it should be gone, but it isn’t. She’s starting to wonder if it ever will be. 

Ronan rubs her hands on her thighs. “Do you think they’ll arrest Whelk before class tomorrow? Because if they do, I’m not doing the reading.”

“If she shows up for class I think that the reading will be the least of her concerns.”

Ronan knows that Eve doesn’t mean anything by it, but Ronan’s mind, which has been on the precipice all evening -- or maybe these past few hours have just been a continuous, slow spiral -- turns automatically to an image of Whelk coming into class with a gun and pointing it at Gansey. Ronan too slow to step between them. Gansey bleeding on the floor. Ronan closes her eyes and doesn’t hit anything. She’s being fucking stupid. Gansey is fine, Gansey is alive, Gansey is at Monmouth, safe, probably tucked into bed with her wire rim glasses on, reading a book. “I better go feed the bird.” She makes no move to turn the car back on, and Eve makes no move to get out. For a moment she presses her tongue to the backs of her front teeth as though she could physically stop the words she’s been holding in for hours from tumbling out. It doesn’t do any good. “I keep thinking about what would’ve happened if Whelk had shot Gansey today.”

“But she didn’t.”

Ronan glances up, wondering for a moment if Eve really finds it so easy not to think of what might have happened, or if she’s just putting up a good front. “Yeah.”

“Lucky you taught her that hook.”

“I never taught her to break her thumb,” Ronan says, because it’s true and because it’s easier to be exasperated than terrified. 

“That’s Gansey for you. Only learns enough to be superficially competent.”

“Loser,” Ronan says evenly, because it’s true and because she loves Gansey anyway.

Finally, Eve puts her hand on the car door, bracing herself to go. “See you tomorrow. Thanks again.”

“No problem, man. See you tomorrow.” Her hands grip tight on the steering wheel as Eve gets out. There are too many people she can’t protect. She turns around and starts driving away, willing herself not to look in the rearview mirror, to just go back to Monmouth, to Gansey, to not think about it. If she gets between Eve and her father, it will only make things more complicated. Besides, it doesn’t happen all the time. From what little Eve says and Ronan’s catalogued memory of every bruise she’s ever showed up to school with, Ronan knows that the threat is constant, but the violence is not. She makes it halfway back to the main road before she breaks and looks in the mirror, and her heart stops. She slams on the brakes.

Eve is on the ground, crouching, her hand covering the side of her face. In the moment before Ronan turns the car around, she thinks: this is selfish. You are going back because you want to hit him, not because this will help. You are going back because you can’t stand seeing this, even if Eve would be better off if you just drove away. You are weak, weak, weak. 

It’s too complicated for her to think about it. If she thinks about it, her brain goes white. Now as always, she wants a rage that is pure and righteous and without complications. She wants to hit Robert Parrish and she wants that to mean that Eve will be safe. In the rearview mirror, she sees him going down the steps, leaning over Eve. She stops thinking. 

Turning the car around, she creates a cloud of dust as she drives back, heart pounding in her throat, her mind entirely clear of anything but the desire for the feeling of her fist connecting with flesh. As she drives she can see him lifting Eve by the pretty fabric of her shirt. Ronan hits the brakes and turns the car off, one fluid motion and then she’s sliding out of her seat, leaving the door open as she charges toward them. 

“What do you want?” Robert Parrish says, turning toward her, and Ronan says, “To do this,” as her fist comes up and crashes into his cheek. Her hand still hurts from hitting the wall earlier and the pain of punching him is tremendous and wonderful. He drops Eve’s shirt and she stumbles. Ronan’s instinct is to reach out and steady her, but Parrish has grabbed the front of Ronan’s shirt and is slamming her into the side of the doublewide and breath has left her body. More reaction than thought, she brings a foot up as he back away to take a swing at her and the heel of her boot makes contact with his stomach. He makes a satisfying oof as he bends over, grabbing at her head, but there’s no hair for him to get a hold of. Ronan hasn’t sufficiently recovered from having the wind knocked out of her to think about his forward momentum and before she can get out of the way, his forehead connects painfully with her nose. She bellows in pain and pushes him away with all her considerable strength. He staggers backward, surprised, and she takes the moment to push off from the side of the house and tackle him. Behind her, Eve’s mother is shouting at her to stop and she thinks she hears the word police in there somewhere, but that doesn’t bring her nearly as close to backing away as the weary sound of Eve’s own voice, calling her name. Still, she moves in on Parrish, easily landing a half dozen blows to his torso. He’s obviously not accustomed to hitting people who hit back. 

That doesn’t mean he isn’t strong, though. When he finds his feet and hits back, the force of the blow to her shoulder reverberates through her body and momentarily takes the power out of her right arm. She reaches up with her left hand and grabs onto his hair, yanking ferociously. His head goes back as he makes a bizarre yowling sound, but when he shakes her off, she stumbles and it only takes one punch to the gut to send her sprawling on her back on the dirt. She rolls onto her side, ready to get back up but there’s a foot flying at her face and she brings her arms up as a shield, curling in on herself. Now that he has a moment to catch his breath, he’s screaming at her, a string of slurs and curses and she wonders for a moment whether he hates her as much as she hates him. His hands come around her wrists to pull her arms away from her face and she thinks: that was a mistake. She yanks her arms swiftly back and pulls him off his feet and finally momentum is on her side because she can use his weight, the inertia of his body to roll him over so she’s on top of him, landing blow after blow to his face. She’s vaguely aware that there’s blood on her hands, blood on her shirt, blood on his face. Then a pair of strong arms come around her chest, pulling her back and for one surreal moment she thinks it’s Gansey, come back to stop the fight, to take them all back to Monmouth. But then her brain registers the red and blue lights of the police cars she hadn’t even noticed arriving. 

She’s being dragged to her feet and only a few feet away she can see another officer holding Eve up. Eve still has her hand over the left side of her face, her ear, and she looks unsteady. She looks at Ronan, and Ronan can see nothing in her eyes. The officer asks Eve if she’s been drinking, and rage surges in Ronan even as she’s being dragged toward the police car.

“She’s not drunk, you goddamn shithead!” She screams, aware that she probably can’t make this situation any worse than it already is. “She’s probably fucking concussed because her dad beats the shit out of her!” 

The police officer pushes her against the side of the police car with only a normal dose of force and somewhere in the back of her mind Ronan thinks, this isn’t the day I’m getting killed. The cuffs come around her wrists and he pulls her back to open the car door and guide her into the back seat. “I’ve got it,” she says, shaking him off, but his hand comes down again on the back of her head. “I said I’ve got it, man. Do you think I’ve never been in one of these before?” She same voice in the back of her head says, don’t be a fucking idiot, but she ignores it. The officer slams the door and gets in the front and they begin to drive away. Ronan turns in her seat as best she can to see what’s happening. Eve is being guided to the other police car and for a terrible moment, Ronan thinks they’re going to cuff her too, but she’s getting in the front. It’ll be okay, she tells herself. Which of course isn’t true, because she’s on her way to the police station and Eve can’t seem to stand up on her own and she’s fucked everything up. She thinks again, weak, weak, weak. No use now. She’s done what she’s done.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Lena & Angie for proofing!
> 
> Tumblr for this project: lady-trc  
> My fandom tumblr: psychotic-adam-parrish


	23. Chapter 23

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ronan doesn’t know what the right words are to say in response to this. Her mouth is dry. After a moment she clears her throat and says, very softly, “Thank you.” Because she understands that Eve has not done this for herself, that if at all possible, Eve would have waited it out, would have saved enough money to move away on her own, would have gone from the doublewide to a college dorm that she would have paid for herself. Ronan had forced her hand. This, she thinks miserably, is Eve saving her and she hates herself for it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for discussion of abuse

The time at the police station feels brief and surreal and Ronan doesn’t fully understand why she’s being released until she gets a chance to talk to Eve on the way to the hospital. The first thing Eve says is, “I can’t hear out of my left ear.” The second is, “I pressed charges against my father. That’s why you’re not --” She doesn’t finish the sentence, but Ronan knows that it would have been “why you’re not in a cell.”

Ronan doesn’t know what the right words are to say in response to this. Her mouth is dry. After a moment she clears her throat and says, very softly, “Thank you.” Because she understands that Eve has not done this for herself, that if at all possible, Eve would have waited it out, would have saved enough money to move away on her own, would have gone from the doublewide to a college dorm that she would have paid for herself. Ronan had forced her hand. This, she thinks miserably, is Eve saving her and she hates herself for it. She realizes, a little surprised, that the feeling in her throat is herself trying to hold back tears. “I didn’t mean --”

“I know you meant well,” Eve says, but her voice is cold and distant.

“Someone should call Gansey,” Ronan says, though she’s the one with the cell phone. Earlier, when they’d been walking away from Blue’s house, Gansey had mentioned casually that Ronan didn’t need to worry about the expulsion letter, that she’d sorted things out. And not an hour later she’d gotten herself arrested. She doesn’t think there’s any part of her body not taken up by shame. 

“It’s late,” Eve says. “She’s probably sleeping.” Neither of them want to tell her what’s happened. Neither of them want to admit that it had happened. “I’ll probably be in the hospital overnight,” she goes on. “I don’t have to worry about -- my things -- or any of that until tomorrow.” 

“Right,” Ronan says, not looking at her. “I’m guessing they won’t keep me that long.”

“You didn’t break your nose?”

“No.” Silence stretches between them.

“The police officer told me you could pick your car up from the impound tomorrow.”

“Oh. Good. Thanks.” Somehow, in the midst of everything, Ronan had actually forgotten about the BMW, abandoned with the door still open in the middle of the trailer park. She thinks it’s probably the longest she’s ever gone without thinking about her car. For a moment she’s overwhelmed by the desire to reach over and pull Eve to her, to crush her in a hug and hold her there until everything is okay again. She squeezes her own wrist until the impulse passes.

At the hospital, they take Eve away and give Ronan a brief check to make sure she doesn’t have a concussion or bruised ribs before sending her home. Standing outside the hospital for the second time that night, Ronan stares at her phone. It’s past two in the morning. Chances are good that Gansey is awake, and probably wondering where Ronan is. There’s no point being a martyr, walking all the way back to Monmouth. She takes a deep breath and calls. Gansey picks up on the second ring.

“Ronan,” she says, and Ronan can tell by her voice that she hasn’t woken her. 

“Hi,” she replies, thinking that she should have planned what she was going to say beforehand. “I need you --” she pauses, taking one more moment to prepare for everything that she’s going to have to tell Gansey. “I need you to pick me up. I’m at the hospital.”

The tone of Gansey’s voice changes immediately. “The hospital? Are you okay? I’m getting up right now, I’m on my way.”

“Yeah, I’m fine. It’s actually -- Eve’s worse than me.”

The silence on the phone is terrible. “Eve?” She doesn’t say it in a panic. Her voice is smooth and even and it occurs to Ronan just how much Gansey thinks about her friends getting hurt, how much she expects it. Like it’s an inevitable moment she’s waiting for, not a possibility to be avoided. 

“She’s going to be alright. It’s just -- her dad hit her pretty hard. She says -- she says she hit her head on the railing on the way down, she thinks that’s what really did the damage. He knocked her down and she hit her head. She’s staying at the hospital overnight, you can pick her up tomorrow, probably.”

“Tomorrow.” Gansey’s tone is still flat and even. “Ronan, what were you doing in the hospital?” She asks it like she doesn’t want to hear the answer.

“Fuck, Gansey, I couldn’t watch. I was dropping her off and I looked back and she was on the ground and I didn’t know how to not go back.”

“You fought Robert Parrish.”

“Yeah.”

“How are you not in jail right now?”

Ronan takes a steadying breath and tries not to want to die as she says it. “Eve is pressing charges. She told the police that I was protecting her, that it wasn’t my fault. There’ll be a trial in -- in a while. I’m not sure when. But they said I was free to go.”

“Okay. Alright. I’m coming to pick you up.”

“Gansey --”

“I’ll be there in ten minutes.” Gansey hangs up on her and Ronan stands for a moment with the phone still pressed to her ear. She thinks, Eve can’t hear out of her left ear. She realizes that if she had to do it all over again, she would do the same thing. All she’s ever wanted is to protect her friends and she’d fucked it up and if she had to do it a thousand times over, she would make the same choice over and over and over again. Nothing about this is simple and no one gets to be innocent. Ronan slides her phone back into her pocket and sits on the stone steps to wait. 

When Gansey pulls up in the Pig, Ronan gets in silently and folds her knees up to the chest as they begin to drive back toward Monmouth. For a while, neither of them says anything. Finally, Gansey says, “I’m glad you’re okay.” Ronan nods. “Is Eve --”

“I don’t know,” Ronan says, cutting her off. “I mean -- her life’s not in danger but I don’t know how okay she is. She told me she couldn’t hear out of her left ear. And that was a while after -- so I don’t know. By the time we got to the hospital she could stand on her own but -- she kept tripping over her own feet. I don’t know.” Ronan watches as Gansey tries to formulate a response, but she gives up eventually. Ronan can’t blame her. She doesn’t know what she would say if she were Gansey. She doesn’t know what Gansey should say. They’ve both seen Eve hurt before, and hurt badly, but there’s never been anything permanent. Ronan has grown used to the idea that Eve is unbreakable, a miraculous and elastic creature trained so long in survival that nothing really gets to her. But that’s not true, and they both know it, even if they do their best not to think about it. Ronan notices that Gansey is chewing her lip so she reaches over and puts her hand on her knee. “She’s going to be okay.” She says it because they need it to be true.

Back at Monmouth, Ronan follows Gansey up the stairs to the main room of the apartment. She walks straight to her room, but she stops outside the door and turns around to face Gansey, who is standing, seemingly at a loss, next to her bed. 

“I didn’t mean for this to happen. I just saw her on the ground and I lost it.”

Gansey shrugs. “I don’t want to fight.”

“But you’re pissed.” It’s like picking at a scab, painful and irresistible.

Gansey covers her face with her hand for a moment. She tone is dull and flat. “I fixed things for you. You were supposed to be expelled and I called the school and -- god, Ronan I fucking bribed them, told them my father would send them a check so they could buy books on goddamn nautical history. And then had to explain to my father why I needed him to send them a check for books on goddamn nautical history. And the next day you get arrested. Of course I’m pissed.” 

Ronan wishes Gansey would scream at her or hit her instead of standing there sounding disappointed and unsurprised. “I’m no good at this.”

“No good at what?” Gansey asks, sounding out of patience.

“I’m no good at -- god, Gansey, I don’t know, at existing while people wanna kill my friends. Like I’m supposed to sit here calmly when I find out that the same person who murdered Leah almost shot you tonight. Like I’m supposed to be able to drive away when I see Eve’s dad coming down the steps to beat the shit out of her.”

Gansey’s face softens a little at that. “It’s okay, Ronan. We’re both okay.”

“Gansey, Leah’s dead.”

Gansey seems to shrink in front of her, and Ronan wishes she could take her words back. “Look, Ronan, I get it. I wish --” She stops for a moment, and Ronan wonders what she wants to finish that sentence with. I wish you weren’t like this. I wish you could sit still for five minutes. I wish I could stop bailing you out. Gansey doesn’t say any of that, because Gansey never says that out loud, just with her eyes and her posture and her sighs. “It’s fine. You’re allowed to mess up sometimes.”

“That’s not a very Gansey-ish thing to say,” Ronan says, rubbing the back of her neck. 

Gansey looks away from her and Ronan regrets what’d she’d said immediately. “I hope that’s not true.” Ronan goes into her room before she can screw things up again. Chainsaw is making small distressed noises and Ronan realizes how overdue he is for a meal. Scooping him up, she sits down on her bed and reaches down for the ziplock bag of his food. 

“I’m sorry, buddy,” she says. “It’s been a long fucking night.” She pulls on her headphones and is about to put on something loud and awful before changing her mind and playing one of the lullabies her father used to put on in her and Mary’s room when they were little. She feels like a sap for doing it, but she needs something soft right now. It’s not a common need for her so she gives into it this once. Now that he’s being fed, Chainsaw doesn’t seem cross or upset anymore, and she’s grateful that he’s not the type to hold a grudge. He’s hers and he’ll forgive her anything. She knows that Gansey’s love for her is unconditional and she’s starting to think that Eve’s might be as well, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t waver. All of them get in fights, and even when she knows they’ll recover, that they’ll patch things up, it’s nice to know that there’s one living thing in her life who’s never mad at her. Well, Chainsaw and Mary.

After the feeding is done, Ronan tugs off her clothes and stretches out in her bed, settling Chainsaw in his tshirt nest next to her on the pillow like she had on their first night together. Earlier she’d thought she wouldn’t be able to sleep at all, but now the length and awfulness of the day hit her and she curls up into a ball and falls almost immediately asleep. It won’t be long before Gansey will be banging on her door to wake her up for the school day and she realizes she’ll have to drive with her in the Camaro. Still, for now she’s grateful just to close her eyes and listen to her father’s lullabies and let her mind go quiet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Lena & Angie for proofing!
> 
> Tumblr for this project: lady-trc  
> My fandom tumblr: psychotic-adam-parrish


	24. Chapter 24

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They drive back to Monmouth in silence and Ronan wonders if any of them will ever have anything to say to each other again. In the parking lot, Ronan goes around to the back and takes as much as she can from the trunk. She can carry almost everything Eve owns on her back. Gansey heads up to the apartment ahead of them, and Ronan thinks she’s trying to steal a second to have alone so she can diminish into the small, private version of herself for a moment before they get there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for discussion of abuse
> 
> **This is the last regular update before the hiatus!! From now until May, I will be posting to a separate fic that will be titled "Raven Girls -- Deleted Scenes"**

Ronan has tennis after school, so Gansey goes to the hospital to pick Eve up and get her things before dropping back by Aglionby to pick her up. When the Camaro pulls up, Ronan doesn’t even have to see Gansey’s face to see that something is wrong. It’s evident in the way she hits the brakes to hard, her knuckles white. No drumming fingers, no arm on the edge of the window, no wrist hanging over the steering wheel. Eve scoots her seat forward to let Ronan get in the back. They don’t make eye contact. They drive back to Monmouth in silence and Ronan wonders if any of them will ever have anything to say to each other again. In the parking lot, Ronan goes around to the back and takes as much as she can from the trunk. She can carry almost everything Eve owns on her back. Gansey heads up to the apartment ahead of them, and Ronan thinks she’s trying to steal a second to have alone so she can diminish into the small, private version of herself for a moment before they get there. Ronan takes her time stomping up the stairs, but when they get there, Blue is standing by Gansey’s bed. She nods at him briefly before starting to make her way toward Leah’s empty room where Eve will be staying. 

“Nice transformer. Is that the police car one?” Blue asks. He’s referring to the toy sticking out of the cereal box where Eve keeps the wages from her three jobs. It takes Eve a moment to register the question and reply in the affirmative, and Ronan winces for her. She laughs without a hint of humor as she goes into Leah’s room. It’s not Blue’s fault, he doesn’t know what’s going on, but Ronan wishes she could just stop everyone from talking to Eve for the next twenty four hours. She deserves a little peace. Eve follows her into the room and Ronan closes the door behind them. Eve jumps a little and Ronan wishes she’d done it more quietly. Eve doesn’t look at Ronan as she puts her things under the bed.

“Listen, I know you don’t want to be here, man,” Ronan says.

“Yeah, well.” 

Leaning back against the door, Ronan watches Eve, the bare strip of back where her tshirt is riding up. “You know this doesn’t mean Gansey owns you. That’s bullshit.”

Eve stops her rummaging and sits on the floor, her elbows resting on her knees. “This is everything she’s ever wanted.”

“That’s really bullshit.” 

Eve gives her a look Ronan wants to say “I’m glad you’re here” or “We both just want you to be safe” or “You still have a right to your pride.” Instead, she chews on one of her leather bands and says, “Whatever man, you can find your own place soon. Or you can pay rent here. It’d be nice. Having you around.” She says it because she knows she’s allowed to say that and Gansey isn’t and Eve should hear it.

Eve says, “I wish I was like you,” and Ronan lets out a bark of a laugh. “I do. You don’t give a shit.”

Ronan wonders what would happen if she said that it isn’t that she doesn’t give a shit, it’s that she likes knowing she’s Gansey’s. She likes living in Gansey’s apartment and going to Gansey’s school and helping with Gansey’s quest. She isn’t sure what else she’d do with her life. “You don’t wanna be me. 

“No. Not really.” 

Eve gets up and Ronan steps away from the door, letting her out. They catch the tail end of Blue and Gansey’s conversation. 

“...right off? That’s grim.” It’s Gansey’s voice, sounding a bit more alive than she’d been in the car. 

“What’s grim?” Eve asks. 

Blue is standing against the headboard of Gansey’s bed, leaning over Gansey who is sprawled on the pillows. “If you spit, Blue,” Ronan says, “It would land right in her eye.” Gansey scrambles away, as though there’s any universe where Blue would take Ronan’s suggestion.

“Blue said Malory tried to wake the line and the man with her got seriously hurt. So we’re not doing it. Not right now.” 

Eve leans against the pillar in the center of the room, her hands in her pockets. “I don’t care about the risk.”

“Me neither,” Ronan says, watching Eve.

“You have nothing to lose,” she says to Eve, and then shifts her gaze to Ronan. “And you don’t care if you live or die.” Ronan makes an effort not to wince. She doesn’t like that Gansey believes that, and she doesn’t like that it’s a little true. It’s been a long time since she’d been able to make sense of her combined ferocious desire to live and the fact that she can count on one hand the things she’s living for. “That makes you both bad judges.”

Blue looks down at Gansey, thoughtful. “You have nothing to gain. That makes you an equally bad judge. But I think I agree. I mean, look at what happened to your British friend.”

“Thank you, Tom, for being the voice of reason.” Ronan glares at her, and Gansey catches her eye. “Do not look at me like that, Ronan. Since when did we decide waking up the ley line is the only way to find Glyndower?” Ronan doesn’t realize until that moment that she cares more about the ley line than Glyndower. Glyndower is Gansey’s thing, and she goes along with it because she loves Gansey. If Gansey had asked her to find out everything she could about the history of British dog breeding, she would have done it, but Glyndower isn’t sacred for her. Not the way that Cabeswater is, and Cabeswater belongs to the ley line. If someone is going to become connected to the ley line and the forest, it should be them, not Whelk.

“We don’t have time to find another way,” Eve says, insistent. “If Whelk wakes it up, she’ll get an advantage. Plus, she speaks Latin. What if the trees know? If she finds Glyndower, she gets the favor, and she gets away with killing Leah. Game over, bad guy takes all.” 

“It’s a bad idea, Eve,” Gansey says, her tone final. “Find me a way to do it without hurting someone, and I’m for it. Until then -- we wait.”

Ronan remembers what she’d thought earlier, about what it means to sacrifice. But the more she thinks about Whelk channeling the power of the ley line, the more she thinks that that, too, would be a sacrifice, and one larger than any of them can understand at this point. 

Eve presses on. “We don’t have time. Persephone said someone will wake the ley line in just a few days.

“Eve, what’s happening now is that someone on the other side of the world has no skin because he fooled around with the ley line. We’ve seen Cabeswater. This isn’t a game. It’s very real and very powerful and we’re not screwing with it.”

“Sometimes I don’t know how you live with yourself,” Eve says, and turns on her heel to go back into her room, slamming the door behind her.

Gansey puts her head in her hands. “I wish she wouldn’t be like that. I wish she wouldn’t say things like that.”

Ronan has her leather bracelet back between her teeth and is tugging at it. “Cut her some slack,” she says. She doesn’t want to fight with Gansey, but for once in her life, she’s taking Eve’s side. “She’s had a pretty shit 24 hours.”

“Because she has to live with me now?”

Ronan drops the leather from between her teeth. “She can’t hear out of one of her ears anymore. It’s fucking permanent. Jesus, Gansey, you can be so -- in your own head sometimes.” Gansey’s look is petulant, but she doesn’t shoot a response back. Blue is chewing on his knuckles. 

After a moment, she says, “I didn’t mean that coming here was the only bad thing.”

“What happened?” Blue asks, soft and nervous. 

Gansey glances back at the closed door of Eve’s room. Ronan knows from experience that a closed door doesn’t necessarily mean that no one is listening, but she hopes that Eve can’t hear them. She thinks Gansey, too, must be aware of how sound travels in the apartment because her voice is low when she replies. “It’s her father. He -- hits her.”

Ronan snorts. “I would use a stronger word than hit.”

“Ronan got in a fight with him so Eve’s pressing charges. And that means she has to move out.”

Blue looks bewildered. “But -- but if he’s abusive, why doesn’t she want to leave?”

Gansey sighs. “It’s complicated. She has her pride, and --”

“It’s her home,” Ronan says, speaking over Gansey. “Because it’s her home and her family and it may be fucking awful but that doesn’t make it easy to leave.”

“You can’t go home either, can you?” Blue says, looking at Ronan with real sympathy in his eyes. She looks away, crossing her arms across her chest.

“It wasn’t like this for me.” 

“I guess I should be heading out,” Blue says, watching his feet. He looks like he doesn’t know what to do with his body.

Gansey takes him to the door and hugs him for a moment longer than Ronan thinks is quite right and says, “Goodbye, Tom.”

Gansey comes back to her bed and curls up in it. Her earlier frustration dissipated, Ronan toes her shoes off and climbs up into the bed next to her. She takes Gansey’s hand and for a long while they just lay there, both looking at their clasped hands instead of at each other. Gansey sighs and looks at her. “When did it get so fucked up?” She asks, her voice almost a whisper.

Ronan shrugs. “I’m pretty sure it’s always been. Leah’s been fucked for seven years. Eve’s been fucked since -- I don’t know when. The first time her dad hit her. Probably before then, too. I’ve been fucked since -- well. And you --” Ronan reaches out to brush some hair out of Gansey’s face.

Gansey says, “I don’t remember the last time I wasn’t scared or worried or sad.”

“Maybe it’s going to get better,” Ronan says. It’s not likely, but it’s not impossible. 

For a moment there’s silence, and Gansey has the look of someone about to tell a secret. “I don’t think it is. I’m pretty sure….Ronan.”

“Yeah?”

“I’m going --” She stops, closes her eyes.

“What is it?”

“Nothing.” 

Eve’s door slams open and she steps into the room. “Where’s Blue?” She asks. Gansey sits up quickly, moving away from Ronan. 

“He went back home,” Gansey says, sounding penitent. Eve frowns and it takes Gansey a moment to realize that she hadn’t been able to understand her. Louder and more distinctly, she says, “He went home.”

Eve nods. “I’m gonna go visit him,” she says, and strides across the room and out of the door. For a long time, Gansey just stares at the closed door.

“You look like a smitten drama club kid,” Ronan comments after few moments.

Gansey lies back down, facing her. “Don’t be horrible about this. Please.”

“She’ll come around. You guys fight all the time.”

“It’s not usually this bad,” Gansey says, and there’s a tremor of fear in her voice.

“Yeah, but you always work it out. It’ll be better when she finds her own apartment.” She bites her lip. “You know she cares about you, right? I mean, really, really cares about you.”

Gansey takes a moment to consider the lines across her hand before replying. “You know, I always get scared that I love my friends more than they love me.”

“Even me?” 

“Even you.”

Ronan rolls onto her back and stares at the ceiling, trying not to get mad. She’s surprised by how quiet she manages to make her voice. “I would do fucking anything for you, Gansey.” When Gansey doesn’t say anything, she takes a deep breath and continues. “When you told me about Whelk -- I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Couldn’t stop imagining you dying. Even though I knew it wasn’t true. And it was like -- you remember how I was after my mother. It felt like that.” When she finally turns, Gansey is staring at her and Ronan can’t read her expression. “What?” Ronan asks.

Gansey shakes her head, pensive. “I shouldn’t doubt you.”

“No, you shouldn’t.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Lena & Angie for proofing!
> 
> Tumblr for this project: lady-trc  
> My fandom tumblr: psychotic-adam-parrish


	25. Chapter 25

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Man, Gansey, what? What’s going on?” She asks, and Gansey turns to look at her but says nothing. Standing there in the shadows, she looks terribly old, and Ronan has to look away for a moment.
> 
> Finally, Gansey speaks. “Eve’s gone to wake the ley line.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Out of hiatus at last! Warning for mentions of suicide

Ronan wakes to the sound of her door slamming open and Gansey’s voice. “Ronan, get up.” 

She blinks groggily in the darkness of her room and drags herself out of bed, but Gansey isn’t standing in the doorway anymore. When she goes out into the main room of the apartment, it’s lit only by the lights of the city coming in through the huge windows. Gansey isn’t there either. Squinting, she sees that the door to the stairs is open, and she walks over to it, peering down to see Gansey standing at the entrance to the building, her hand on the doorframe. 

“Man, Gansey, what? What’s going on?” She asks, and Gansey turns to look at her but says nothing. Standing there in the shadows, she looks terribly old, and Ronan has to look away for a moment.   


Finally, Gansey speaks. “Eve’s gone to wake the ley line.”

“What,” Ronan says, already coming down the stairs to join Gansey at the entrance. Now she sees what Gansey had been looking at, or rather, the absence that Gansey had been looking at. The Camaro is gone. “Fucking unbelievable. Left all on her own, what kind of shithead move --”

“She has a gun,” Gansey says, and Ronan’s drops off mid-sentence.

“You don’t think -- not herself.” Ronan is already starting toward the BMW, heart pounding in her throat.

Still in the doorway, Gansey says “I don’t know what she’s planning to do, I just saw -- it’s her father’s.”

“Gansey, we have to go now.”

“Oh my god, Ronan, you’re in your boxers. We’ll get dressed and then we’ll go. I woke up to the lights of the Camaro, she’s only been gone a few minutes. You’ll speed the whole way, we’ll catch up to her.”

Ronan brushes back past Gansey and takes the stairs two at a time. “You’d fucking better be right about that,” she says, thinking  _ I am not losing a friend tonight _ .

They’re dressed and in the car minutes later, Ronan stepping on the gas with a force that makes Gansey lean back in her seat and go, “Woah!” As Ronan is about to turn onto the highway, Gansey says, “Go to Fox Way.”

“Gansey --”

“We need to bring Blue for this. He could be important. You can drive as fast as you want.”

“Fine.” 

The residents of 300 Fox Way seem to be ready for the arrival of the girls, because Blue is sprinting down the walk only moments after Ronan parks. He gets in the car and asks, “What’s going on?”

“Eve’s gone,” Gansey says, turning to face him as Ronan takes off again toward the highway. “We think she’s going to wake the ley line. She took the Pig.”

“Oh,” Blue says softly. “I think that might be a little bit my fault.”

“How do you mean?” Gansey asks.

“I told her to be brave.”

When they get on the highway, Ronan keeps pushing on the gas, hitting seventy and then eighty. It’s partially because she wants to catch up with Eve and partially because the only way she knows how to deal with the fear and the anger pulsing through her body is to overwhelm it all with adrenaline. She takes the curves on the road to Cabeswater at breakneck speed, but neither Gansey nor Blue says anything about it. At the meadow with the raven, she slams on the brakes and they all spill out of the car. Gansey hands Ronan a flashlight that she’d taken from the glove compartment, and Blue pulls one from his pocket.

“Came prepared,” Ronan says as they begin their walk across the meadow. The two beams do little against the oppressive blackness of the night, and the high grass and oyster shells look eerie in the white light. Cabeswater at night is a fearful thing, and Ronan thinks she loves it more fiercely than ever. Near the treeline they find the Camaro, and Ronan sees the way Gansey clenches her fist, trying not to look as angry as she feels. They walk past it into the woods, and as soon as the cross the border of meadow to forest, the light changes. It’s suddenly afternoon, a gloriously bright and warm day. Ronan has to squeeze her eyes shut for a moment to give them time to adjust. 

Beside her, Gansey’s voice says, “What was Eve thinking. How can you mess with--” but she stops abruptly, and when Ronan manages to open her eyes fully, she understands why. The red Mustang that had been Leah’s is parked there among the trees, in a space that seems make precisely for it. It doesn’t make any sense there. It would be impossible to drive it to the spot where it now rests, given the density of the trees around it. But it somehow seems right that Cabeswater would be able to manipulate space like this. Blue makes a small sound in the back of his throat, and Gansey and Ronan follow his gaze to the windshield. Ronan feels pressed in by misery when she sees the word written in the pollen: MURDERED. She thinks of Leah and her half-presence and what it means to have to mourn for your own self. 

“Leah? Leah, are you here with us? Did you write this?”

“Oh,” Gansey says, more a sound than a word, and Ronan turns to look at the window in front of which Gansey is standing. There, a new word is being traced in the pollen, like the one on the windshield. It’s the same word, and Leah’s invisible finger continues to trace it over and over again as if unable to stop, the letters covering each other until it’s not legible at all, until it’s just a blank space. They stand there, huddled together, and Ronan, who has never thought of herself as sentimental, has to fight the urge to take both their hands. Instead, she presses her hand not to her mouth or her eyes but to her breastbone, feeling the beating of her own heart beneath her fist. The beauty of Cabeswater and the afternoon sun makes it difficult to imagine that anything terrible has ever happened here. She wonders if Leah had been thinking the same thing when she began to write her message, if she had wanted them not to be taken in by the loveliness of it.   

“Leah, I’m so sorry,” Gansey says, her voice soft, and Blue says, “Me, too.”

The word feels too big and too meaningless in Ronan’s throat. They can’t undo anything that’s happened to Leah. Leaning forward over the hood of the car, to reach the windshield, she writes REMEMBERED in the pollen. This, too, feels small, but she hopes it means something to Leah. She stuffs her hands in her pockets and begins to walk away, wanting to make some space between herself and the others. It’s not shame, exactly, that makes her want to be alone right now, only the fact that for her, grief has always been a private thing. Behind her she can hear Gansey and Blue, leaving a little distance between them, and she mentally thanks Gansey for leaving her alone. She hears Gansey say, “Excelsior,” and, when Blue asks what it means, “Onward and upward.” 

They keep walking, and Ronan begins to wonder if they’ll ever find Eve. They couldn’t have been that far behind her, but the forest is a living and complicated thing, and as much as she wants to believe that it would lead them where they need to go, there’s a chance, too, that Eve had walked for two minutes and somehow gone farther than they would in hours. It’s difficult to say whether time and space in these woods is a matter of chance or something carefully planned and plotted by the trees. Ronan can’t stop thinking about the gun. The possibility, however slight, that Eve might shoot herself keeps Ronan’s heart racing even as they walk slowly. She would have been certain it would never happen -- Eve is a survivor, a person well versed in keeping her head down and making it through just about anything -- but her world has just gone sideways and Ronan feels for the first time in their friendship genuinely uncertain of who Eve is and what she’ll do. 

Gansey’s voice comes beside her, low enough that Blue won’t hear. “I should have listened to you and Eve when you said to come to Cabeswater and make the sacrifice tonight. I should have known that she’d do it alone if I told her no.”

Ronan shakes her head. “You couldn’t have known. This isn’t typical Parrish.”

“That’s true, at least. She doesn’t usually do things I tell her not to do.”

Ronan sighs and scuffs the edge of her shoe against a tree as they walk by it. “She doesn’t owe that to you, you know. That’s what she’s always insisting on, that you don’t own her.”

“I never thought I did. I just thought she’d respect what I wanted us to do. As a group.” She pauses, but Ronan can tell from the hitch in her voice that she’ll go on. “You wanted to go too, but you didn’t sneak out on your own. You would never do that.”

“No,” Ronan says. “I wouldn’t.” She tries to keep the pride out of her voice, but it’s there, insidious. There’s some petty part of her crying out for recognition of the fact that she wouldn’t betray Gansey like this. She may be a disaster, may get in fights, get terrible grades, be steadily drinking her way toward an early grave, but she wouldn’t do this to Gansey. It irks her to know that in all likelihood, if they make it out of this alive, Eve will be forgiven, her sins forgotten. She’ll still be the golden child and Ronan will still be the fuck-up. She hates how bitter it makes her. She hates that this is what she’s thinking about while the other half of her is tensed, waiting for a gunshot through the trees. 

Gansey grabs her wrist and speaks again, louder this time so that Blue can hear. “I think I saw movement. That way.” She points. Her voice drops to a whisper. “Quiet as we can, if it’s Whelk we want to see her before she sees us.”

As they continue forward, Gansey takes the lead as she habitually does, and Ronan has to resist the urge to step in front of her, to move between Gansey and danger. A few moments later, Gansey holds out both her arms, stopping Ronan and Blue. She holds a finger to her lips and points into a small clearing in the woods where there are three figures, somehow difficult to see in the dappled sun. It seems more like a trick of Cabeswater than of the light. But now that Gansey has pointed them out, Ronan can see Whelk and Eve and, confusingly, Neeve, Blue’s aunt. Neeve is on the ground, tied up, and Ronan realizes that the object in Whelk’s hand is a knife when light flashes off of it. Eve is standing across a shallow pool from them, posture defensive, unarmed. It takes Ronan a moment to realize why the area looks so familiar. All of Cabeswater seems familiar to her, but she actually has been here before. The large tree between them and Eve is the tree in which the others had had visions. Ronan remembers vividly now that day, the feeling she’d had when she’d touched the tree. If Whelk had been looking for a place of power, she seems to have found one. Gansey looks from Ronan to Blue, as if to ask,  _ Are you ready? _ They nod, and Gansey takes a step toward the pool. In her clear, firm Queen Gansey voice, she says, “Ms. Whelk.” 

At the sound, everyone in the clearing turns to look at them. Whelk seems shocked, Eve is unreadable. But Ronan feels reassured, because in the past few seconds, Gansey has transformed from an anxious, disappointed girl stumbling through the woods in search of her friend into a woman who is here to stop the end of the world. 


	26. Chapter 26

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Now she can move her head again so she turns and sees Eve crouching in the middle of the pentagram, her body seeming improbably small. The pain in her jaw is preventing Ronan from reacting with proper speed and so she can only blink and think something really terrible is about to happen as Eve says, “I sacrifice myself.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this is a day late, I was dealing with internet outages last night! Warning for death & blood

“Ms. Whelk, the police are on their way. I really recommend you step away from that woman to avoid making this any worse.” Gansey is using the voice that Ronan is absolutely convinced could end wars and stop fires. The fact that Ronan can’t imagine saying no to that voice makes it seem a little surreal to her that Whelk doesn’t look like she’s about to comply. But then Ronan blinks, and there’s no woman for Whelk to step away from. It’s impossible that Neeve moved out of sight in an instant, but she did. Ronan tenses, waiting for movement, and she’s ready when it comes.

Ronan is in motion as soon as Whelk dives for middle of the pentagram drawn out on the forest floor, and their bodies collide as Whelk raises the gun she’d been reaching for. It should knock the wind out of Whelk but somehow it doesn’t, and lights spark in Ronan’s eyes as the gun smashes into the side of her face. She tastes blood and doesn’t think.

She hears Blue’s voice shouting, “Stop!” 

Now she can move her head again so she turns and sees Eve crouching in the middle of the pentagram, her body seeming improbably small. The pain in her jaw is preventing Ronan from reacting with proper speed and so she can only blink and think  _ something really terrible is about to happen  _ as Eve says, “I sacrifice myself.”

“Eve, no! No,” Gansey calls, still standing with Blue outside of the pentagram. Ronan has no words. The who forest begins to shake and shake, the ground tilting and splitting and Ronan thinks that this place must be her own self, her own mind made into trees and stones and dirt. That’s what’s on the tip of her tongue every time she wonders  _ what is this place? _

“It’s an earthquake!” Gansey shouts, but Ronan isn’t quite sure she’s right.

“Look what you’ve done, you crazy fuck!” She screams, feeling that it’s maybe her who’s done it too, at least a little. Looking around, she tries to find something to hold onto, some safe place she could take Gansey and Blue to. She isn’t even thinking about Whelk when she hears the gun go off. Wheeling around, she sees Eve pressing a hand to her chest and for an awful moment, Ronan is certain that blood will begin to seep through her fingers. But she’s unharmed, touching her collarbone only in amazement that it’s unbroken. The forest has gone silent and still and this, too, is Ronan’s mind made manifest. She’s trying to breath, to suck in enough air to make the dark spots leave her vision and so she doesn’t hear whatever it is that Gansey and Eve are saying to each other. She can’t bring herself to care. Eve should be dead but she isn’t. How many of her friends, she wonders, are living stolen lives? How many years is that knowledge going to take off her own life?

But she does hear it when the trees begin to speak. Her head snaps up and she tries to focus her mind to translate the Latin, but she doesn’t need to go to much effort. It’s one word, repeated over and over again: a warning. “Take cover,” she yells, just as Blue says, “Something’s coming!”

Ronan sees them now too, a herd of mythical looking white creatures, their hooves creating another miniature earthquake as they approach. But then Blue’s hand comes around her elbow and she’s drawn backward, stumbling, into the hollow of a tree. Truth be told, she would rather have been trampled to death than go into that tree, but it’s not her choice. She knows what this tree is now, with the awful certainty that she knows everything in this forest. It’s a nightmare tree, and she made it. It’s not that it bears an eerie resemblance to something she’s dreamed, it’s that it actually  _ came out of her fucking head _ . And so she knows what will happen when she stands inside it and closes her eyes. 

It’s the same old tired thing. Theme and variations. Her mother on the ground, skull smashed in, dead. And then she blinks and it’s Gansey. And then she blinks and it’s Mary. And then she blinks and it’s Eve, and then it’s Leah and then -- though this is a recent addition -- it’s Blue. And then, and then, and then. The terrible thing isn’t the image, it’s that somehow, every time, she believes it. The grief is already hitting her in that brief moment that she’s looking at the body. And because the loss is different each time, it’s like getting knocked down by wave after wave after wave. It’s like drowning. 

And then it’s over. She’s pushed out of the tree by Gansey --  _ alive  _ \-- along with Blue --  _ alive.  _ Dazed, she blinks in the still bright afternoon sunlight and sees that Eve --  _ alive, alive alive  _ \-- is standing just where she had been before, but now the gun is in her hand.

Gansey is the first to speak. “Eve, how did you get the gun?” 

“The trees.”

It’s a nonsensical answer but Ronan doesn’t even think to doubt it.

“The trees? God! Did you shoot her!”

For a moment, Ronan doesn’t understand the question, but then she sees Whelk, her body crumpled but rather miraculously not entirely destroyed. She must not have gotten out of the way of the herd in time. It isn’t in Ronan’s nature to rejoice at any death, but she feels an undeniable swell of relief at the knowledge that the woman who has pointed a gun at both of her best friends isn’t around anymore. 

Eve and Gansey are still talking, saying something about death and justice, but Ronan is again unable to focus. Her heart is still pounding out its grateful rhythm --  _ alive, alive, alive _ \-- not for herself but for her friends. They could have all died tonight. She could have lost them all. She’s never letting them out of her sight again. 

Blue’s words finally ground her again. “I think we should get out of here. Earthquakes and animals and -- I don’t know how much of an effect I’m having, but these things are…”

Ronan wants to get out of here, too. She loves Cabeswater, but she isn’t sure she trusts it. She attempts not to think about the irony of that. Right now, all she wants is to go home. Or rather, not home but to Monmouth Manufacturing. If she could take them all to the Barns, she thinks, everything would be right with the world. For only a moment she allows herself to imagine them lying together in front of the fire on blankets and pillows gathered from around the house, but then she stops herself. It’s too painful. It hurts like happiness. 

“Yes,” Gansey says. “We need to go. We can decide what to do about Whelk outside.”

It seemed to Ronan that there was not really much to be done about Whelk at this point, but she wasn’t going to argue. She was still finding the concept of speech a little difficult. Not that talking was ever easy, but sometimes it slid from problematic to impossible, and at this point she didn’t trust her tongue. 

But before any of them can move, the forest speaks. It’s Latin, but it’s English too. Not both overlapping, but both together. Ronan doesn’t understand the mechanics of it, but she understands the word.  _ Wait. _

_ Girl,  _ Cabeswater says, and though there are three girls present, Ronan knows that it means Gansey.  _ Scimus quid quaeritis. (Girl. We know what you’re looking for.) _

“What am I looking for?” Gansey says, as though there is more than one thing that she has ever been looking for. But Ronan understands that she needs to hear it spoken, needs the trees to tell her.

“They said there’ve always been rumors of a queen buried somewhere along the spirit road. They think she may be yours.”

Ronan watches Gansey’s face, watches how it fails to change, and understands perfectly the effort that goes into her stillness at this moment. Ronan things she probably isn’t breathing. Gansey has been looking for so many years, has searched in different countries, different continents, was drawn to Henrietta not so much because of its ravens and its Welsh place names and its mythology but because of the feeling she had when she first came here. Ronan remembers Gansey saying all of this, not only once but over and over again, a well-known story brought out only in the small hours of the night when neither of them can sleep. Ronan can hear Gansey’s voice in her head the same way she can still hear her mother’s voice reading the first lines of  _ Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland  _ on summer evenings at the Barns.  _ Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do _ . So she had heard Gansey telling her own story.  _ It’s the heart of this place, Ronan. I don’t know how else to say it. It feels living. It feels like it could hold a life. For centuries, even.  _ And beneath those words, Ronan had always heard another implication.  _ It feels like it could hold me.  _ Gansey has always been one to trust intuition, but it must be something else, hearing the trees tell her that her feeling has been right all along. 

Gansey puts her hand to her breastbone in a characteristic gesture and says “Gratias tibi. Thank you.” 

The trees go still and silent, but Gansey is still gazing up at the leaves that were rustling just a moment ago. Ronan thinks again,  _ it’s starting, it’s starting, it’s starting.  _ In her stomach there is a sick mixture of dread and adrenaline, the same feeling she gets taking sharp turns too fast on mountain roads, knowing she could die the next moment. A high, sharp singing in her blood that she lives for. But it’s more complicated now, because it’s not just her life that they’re playing with -- it’s Gansey’s, too, and Eve’s and Blue’s and Leah’s, if you can count risking the life of a ghost. Terrible things could happen to any of them. Ronan has a feeling that something terrible has just happened to Eve, even though she’s just standing there, apparently unharmed. But she had given herself to this forest and to whatever higher magic controls it, and Ronan can’t see that ending well. 

“Gansey?” Blue says, gentle as Ronan has never before heard him when speaking to Gansey.

Gansey turns to look at him, eyes vacant for a moment before she shifts back into focus and nods. “Yes. We should go.” 

They make their way back through the forest, trying to stick to the path they’d come by but finding the forest unfamiliar around them, though Ronan still feels like she knows the way. She’s not sure she could ever quite feel lost here. At any rate, she trusts that no matter which way they turn, they’ll end up back at the Camaro eventually. 

When they cross the border from the trees into the field, night descends again. Ronan had almost forgotten that it isn’t daytime. There’s an edge of light around the horizon though, and Ronan guesses that it must be close to dawn. 

Gansey gets into the Camaro, followed, somewhat to Ronan’s surprise, by Blue, leaving Ronan and Eve to ride together in the BMW. For a moment, Ronan stands by the driver’s side door, looking over the roof of the car at Eve, who has her hands in her pockets and refuses to look away. 

“What the fuck did you do, Parrish,” Ronan asks at last. Eve keeps eye contact for a moment before looking away, squinting at the horizon. She looks away with intention, though, like she could keep staring Ronan down but has gotten bored with it. Ronan doesn’t know if she’s overinterpreting, but Eve seems to have a strange new coolness to her, and it’s frightening.

“To be honest,” Eve says, voice slow and little bit sleepy. “I don’t entirely know.”   
  



	27. Chapter 27

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Though Ronan knows that she’ll fight with Eve and with Gansey and that they’ll fight with each other again, and likely sooner rather than later, it’s good to know that when they all nearly die there’s a brief moment of respite when they just get to remember that they love each other.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for death and funerals and grave-robbing and all the things you'd expect from the last chapter of TRB

Ronan and Eve don’t speak on the drive back to Monmouth. Though Gansey and Blue had left first, Ronan is channeling every messy thing inside her into driving as far above the speed limit as she dares with Eve in the car. She’s never in her short life driven exactly safely, but she’s less reckless with the lives of her friends than she is with her own. All the same, she wonders what would happen if she crashed the car. Nothing had happened when Whelk had shot Eve. Is she immortal now? Will Cabeswater keep her body safe no matter what happens to her?  It’s a theory Ronan might have tested if her stomach didn’t clench in horror at the thought of it being disproven.

They pass the Camaro and arrive at Monmouth half an hour before the others. It feels like an awful stretch of time, Ronan alone in her room, knowing that Eve is on the other side of the door, unable to sit still with that knowledge but unwilling to go out and talk to her. When she hears Gansey gets back, Ronan listens to her speaking to Eve in hushed tones, incredibly not about the sacrifice that Eve has just made to a mystical forest but about Whelk and the police. When Blue’s voice doesn’t join them, Ronan realizes that they must have driven to Fox Way before coming back here. All for the best, Ronan thinks. She doesn’t think she could deal with someone outside their circle right now. Blue is slowly and surely becoming part of the circle, but he’s not quite there yet and Ronan still isn’t sure she trusts him. Even with only Gansey and Eve in the front room, it’s a long time before Ronan goes out, and when she does it’s with Chainsaw clutched to her chest as some kind of emotional protection. The other two are sitting cross-legged on Gansey’s bed and Ronan stands, leaning her knees against the edge of mattress, still unwilling to join them entirely.

“We’re not calling the police,” Eve says. “Whelk had gone missing anyway, it’s better just to let them think she got away.”

“I’m not sure it’s right,” Gansey says, and Eve winces. “But there will be so many  questions and I don’t think any of them will be satisfied with the testimony of three teenagers that their Latin teacher was trampled to death by magical white buffalo.”

“Fine,” Ronan says, because it’s not really what she’s worried about anyway. But they don’t talk about what she’s worried about. Instead they listen as Gansey talks about Leah’s upcoming funeral, the announcement of which had been in the newspaper (“You read the  _ newspaper _ , Gansey?” Ronan asks, and gets back the only slightly snappish answer, “Yes, and you’d know that I go down and pick it up from the curb every morning if you got up at a reasonable time.”) and a fledgling plan to move Leah’s bones back to the ley line. There’s a chance, they agree, that this would restore Leah, and though the tension of the night is far from gone, the idea of getting Leah back lifts their collective spirits enough to get them all curled up on the bed together, Chainsaw moving hesitantly over the mountains of their bodies.

This is what Ronan likes best about the three of them, this intimacy with its vague and undefined undertones. It’s not perfect and it leaves an insatiable longing in Ronan’s chest, but she’ll take it for now. She’s willing, in general, to take what she can get. They end up falling asleep together like that, and though Ronan knows that she’ll fight with Eve and with Gansey and that they’ll fight with each other again, and likely sooner rather than later, it’s good to know that when they all nearly die there’s a brief moment of respite when they just get to remember that they love each other.

 

The next few weeks leave no time for contemplating what had happened in Cabeswater. Gansey tutors, cajoles, and hassles Ronan into passing all her finals and lets Ronan scream as loudly as she wants to when they get back to Monmouth after that last day of school. She feels happy and primal when she flings her arms around Gansey and says, “God fucking damnit, man, we’re  _ free _ .”

The more important work that Ronan does is securing an apartment for Eve. She’s so clearly unhappy at Monmouth that Ronan is willing to create distance between them, and she goes the only place she knows where she will be considered a good reference for a tenant: St. Agnes. The woman who runs the building knows her only as the kid who comes to church every Sunday without fail, even when she’s bruised, even when she’s hungover, even when she and Declan can’t bring themselves to speak to each other. The apartment that the woman shows her is tiny and horrible and Ronan suspects it will be immensely appealing to Eve. The next day she helps Eve clear her room out and carts the stuff over to the church in her BMW with Eve silent in the front seat, the cashed checks from the past several weeks folded in her hand for the deposit and first month’s rent. Gansey isn’t there. Ronan complains more than she needs to about carrying boxes up the stairs. At the door, she turns and and holds out her fist, pinky extended. “Hey,” she says. “Promise you’ll stay here?”

Eve snorts. “I thought pinky promises were Gansey’s thing.”

Ronan shrugs. “Whatever.”

Eve steps up to her with a bit of a challenge in her eyes and hooks her pinky around Ronan’s, then brings her fist to her mouth to kiss it. Ronan does the same.

“Until I can go someplace better,” she says.

“Good enough for me.”

 

Leah’s funeral is in early summer. Gansey convinces Eve to wear one of her black dresses, and Ronan puts on a suit. She doesn’t wear it often, but she likes how she feels in it, and she likes knowing how good it looks on her. They pick up Blue, whose outfit, while dark in palette, has the usual Sargent flair of eccentricity. He and Gansey bicker about it for a while before Ronan says flatly, “Like Leah cares.”

The day is bright and sunny and the ceremony of burial feels strange to Ronan, as distantly removed from her sorrow for Leah as possible. The last funeral she’d been to was her mother’s, and the roaring, all-consuming grief she’d felt then makes it difficult for her even to remember what the weather was like that day, though she knows that Mary had been wearing the vintage, patent-leather shoes that had once been Nora’s. Now, Ronan stands well back while Blue goes up to Leah’s family and tells her mother something that makes her cry. They spend most of the afternoon and evening in the BMW, the three others chattering nervously while Ronan sits silent in the driver’s seat. At dinner time they pull the picnic from the trunk and eat on the abandoned road, the asphalt warm beneath them. When it’s dark and all the staff have left, Eve, Gansey, and Blue go to dig Leah’s bones up while Ronan remains standing by the BMW to watch for anyone who might come down this back country lane in the middle of the night. She watches as the beams of two flashlights bob across the field. Finally they arrive, out of breath and carrying a tarp. It’s too strange to think that what remains of Leah is wrapped up and being shoved into the trunk, so Ronan doesn’t consider it too long.

They go back to the old church near the woods where they’d found the body and again Ronan stands lookout until Gansey calls her name. She comes over and stands with the others in the remains of the church. It’s ruined and beautiful and as much as Ronan loves St. Agnes, she thinks this place has more of God in it than that formal place.

She’s making her way up to the altar which is somehow still mostly intact when Leah’s voice comes from behind them. “Can we go home? This place is so creepy.”

“Leah!” Gansey says, her voice soaring in a way that Ronan hasn’t heard in a long time.

“Czerny,” Ronan says, grinning, as Blue flings himself into Leah’s arms.

“No,” Leah says, meeting Ronan’s eyes even as she holds onto Blue, and Ronan thinks she’s right, she should be just  _ Leah.  _ “I’m serious,” Leah goes on. “this place creeps me the hell out, can we go?”

“Yes, we can go home,” Gansey says, clapping Leah on the back and leading them out of the ruins.

“I’m still not eating pizza.”

Ronan still stands, facing the altar, gripped by an idea. She doesn’t know what makes her decide to do it – all she knows at this is a strange and marvelous and magical night, and there’s no moment that will feel more right than this. Looking over her shoulder to see the others standing in the entrance, waiting for her. She says, “I guess now would be a good time to tell you I took Chainsaw out of my dreams.”

She says it with casual bravado, even though it makes her heart pound in her chest.  _ I’m sorry, mom _ , she thinks, but the truth is, if she has a choice between keeping a promise and telling the truth, she’ll always tell the truth. People shouldn’t be made to promise that they’ll lie for the rest of their lives.

Gansey is the first to find words. “Ronan,” she says carefully, tone even. “What the  _ fuck _ .”

Ronan stuffs her hands in her pockets. This is the really difficult part. “I’ve done it before. I do it all the time, actually. Not birds. Birds are complicated. But – most of the shit in my room. My bracelets. That hat I gave Gansey for her birthday last year. They’re from my dreams.”

“Whoa,” Blue says, sounding deeply impressed. “That’s  _ amazing. _ ”

“I don’t understand,” Gansey says. “How do you mean, they’re from your dreams? How does something come from a dream?”

“Fucked if I know,” Ronan says, with a big shrug of her shoulders. She’s trying to get rid of some of the excess energy that’s threatening to make her shiver, an aftereffect of the adrenaline that came with her confession. “I see something in my dream, and I – I hold onto it, and when I wake up, it’s there. It’s real. Exactly the way it was in my head.”

“And you took a bird?” Gansey says. “Ronan, the ethical implications –“

“I know, I know,” Ronan says. “I know, it’s fucking --. I don’t know. It’s weird. I don’t know. I’m bad at explaining it. I’ve never had to do it before.” She glances at Eve, who still hasn’t said anything. Leah, too, has been silent, but she has an impish smile on her face that makes Ronan feel certain that she’s known all along. No keeping secrets from the dead, Ronan thinks.

“That means,” Eve says at last, “that you can have anything you want.”

“Not exactly. It’s hard. I can’t take anything that big. I have to understand the thing. I have to  _ know  _ the thing. It has to feel real enough in the dream that I can actually believe in it.”

Eve grins, and Ronan feels like a whole orchestra is playing behind her ribs. She hadn’t expected that. She isn’t sure when she started wanting to see Eve smile so badly. “You could dream a hundred dollar bill, though.”

“You wouldn’t like that, would you?”

Eve shrugs. “I don’t think that matters.” She pauses and looks at Ronan, thoughtful. “You’re not like the rest of us, are you, Lynch.”

Ronan thought this was a little unfair. “No,” she said, with just the right about of poison in her voice. “And you aren’t either, are you, Parrish?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's all, folks! I'll probably starting working on TDT sometime this summer, but in the meantime if you message me at [lady-trc](http://lady-trc.tumblr.com) or [psychotic-adam-parrish](http://psychotic-adam-parrish.tumblr.com) I will probably write drabbles for you in this verse because I love my girls and anyone who will talk to me about them.
> 
> Again, MASSIVE thank you to Lena and Angie for all the work they did proofing & encouraging me!

**Author's Note:**

> Updates Monday/Wednesday/Friday. Some dialogue is lifted directly from the books.


End file.
